3 Review(s)

The Wine-Dark Sea is a collection of fantasy and horror short stories by Robert Aickman. Summary of the Book Aickman’s world is a strange one, where the uncanny marries the eerie and births a new macabre entity which will frighten readers into reading these stories only in a brightly lit room. He blends sexuality with a malevolent mirth, and his stories are often darkly comic, yet terrifying supernatural in subject. In The Wine-Dark Sea, a mysterious Amazonian island is peopled by three sorceresses, elemental feminine arcana and matriarchal society which is slowly threatened by the approaching touch of modern times. In The Trains, two girls decide to trust the welcome of a dark and sooty fortress, where an old man dwells with his manservant, an unnerving man with pitch-black hair. Tones of lesbianism and kin-murder touch this story strongly, terrifying readers just as much as it seduces them with Aickman’s words. And, in Your Tiny Hand is Frozen, a ghostly voice seduces the attentions of a wealthy man through the telephone. The man becomes maddened in obsession as he struggles to discover who this person is, and if he doesn’t hurry, he will find himself married to another person, one whom he doesn’t love half as much as he is obsessed with this ghost in the machine. Also included are the classic stories: Growing Boys, The Fetch, The Inner Room and Into the Woods. About Robert Aickman Robert Florence Aickman was an English writer and conservationist. He is known mainly for supernatural fiction, calling his work “strange stories”. He has also written The Late Breakfasters and The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic. Aickman was awarded the World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1975, the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for his story The Stains.