Dualism and Horror

Now that -is- interesting. I was actually thinking of Aickman when I wrote that! He's one of my favorites too. But for me he's very much a writer of supernatural horror, rather than evil. The dog in "The Same Dog" or the father in "The Stains" scare -me- because they seem representative of an alien, unknowable universe, rather than "evil". I don't know what Aickman's religious beliefs were, if any, but the impression I receive from his books is of a fundamentally pagan worldview, where "good" and "evil" are labels for things we don't understand rather then absolutes.

Well... no, actually. Sorry to be so insistent, but this is the essence of Lovecraft's fiction. The Dark is merely sleeping, as the result of certain cosmic cycles - it hasn't been beaten back by anything. Later imitators developed the idea of Good Gods defeating the Bad Gods and imprisoning them, but you don't find that in the original McCoy.

Perhaps as a generalisation for a certain kind of horror story, but I'm still not convinced. If you find that the norm turns out to be Not What It Seems, haven't you just collapsed dualism into monism?

Northanger Abbey, actually. (Sorry.)

Ah. I would tend to agree that they represent an unknowable universe; I've always wondered what exactly Aickman's beliefs were as well (I've never managed to get ahold of a copy of his autobiography...) other than a passionate belief in England's inland waterways (which is parodied in "My Poor Friend"). However, an unknowable can be implicitly evil or good, I think--I would say there are moral judgments very quietly hiding in a lot of Aickman's stories--it's because they are hiding that they are so convincing... I think that the haunting statement in "Larger Than Oneself," (roughly--don't have the book with me) "They got what they wanted; as in the end we all do," has moral overtones--David Hartwell seems to agree, and placed it in the section of THE DARK DESCENT that deals with stories about good & evil. After all, Christian thinking suggests that in this state both good and evil are to some extent unknowable--"now we see through a glass darkly." And a story like "The Houses of the Russians" strikes me very much a good/evil tale, in a Christian sense. While "The Real Road to the Church" would be touching on the Mystery in Good. Not that I'm saying Aickman's a C. S. Lewis of the spooky or anything--I'm not at all sure from his fiction what his beliefs were, but I'd say he makes use of good and evil and even very Christian ideas about them at times. Hmmm... Probably boring the daylights out of the non-Aickman reading public on the list. Although if you like Wolfe, you should give him a try.