“The Wine-Dark Sea” (1966)

My introduction to Robert Aickman: I impulsively picked up the collection for which this is the title story because I kept noticing Aickman’s name coming up. The story is reasonably representative of him, certainly in its rather longer length of about 50 pages. It reminded me quite a bit of John Fowles’s novel The Magus, also set among the islands of Greece. The Magus was published in 1965, so conceivably it was of some direct influence here. Both seem to feel they can hear the footfalls of ancient Olympian gods beyond the mist of the modern-day Greek islands. “The Wine-Dark Sea” is the story of a man, Grigg, who steals a boat to visit a small island off the coast of a much larger island where he is vacationing. Grigg is drawn to the small island first by the strange and unexplained hostility of the people living on the larger island. No one will take him there and no one will really explain why. They won’t even rent him a boat if that’s where he’s going. So he steals one—later he’s told he would be “torn to pieces” if he tried to return it. On the island are three beautiful women—Lek, Tal, and Vin—who tell him they are sorceresses. They bear an equally hostile attitude toward “Greeks,” though they often seem to be talking more about the ancient variety. There’s a lot of interesting undercurrent to all this, mixing in elements of ancient mythology, not just sirens but gods and alchemies of earth, fire, air, and water. It resolves in apocalyptic fashion, with a stupefying revelation of what lies beneath the island, and with just enough explanation to make it almost perfectly, mysteriously resonant. Until then the horror, the weird, the strange, such as it is, is barely there, but something nags at you. The story casts a spell, reminding me in some ways of experiences on LambdaMOO, the one-time online collaborative creative space, gentle, daffy, but with hard edges glinting out of the murk that might slice you. “The Wine-Dark Sea,” intimations of Homer and all, is ultimately a kind of tragedy, but so removed we can’t entirely feel it. It works slowly, at the deeper levels I’ve come to know of Aickman. It’s a great way to start with him.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.