Classic Horror Story I have Found Pt.1

Into The Woods

Margaret Sawyer, the wife of a prosperous Manchester building contractor, is bored and unsatisfied with her life. She travels to Sweden on a business trip with her husband, where she finds herself staying overnight at the Kurhus, a Place for insomniacs, some of whom have not slept for years (there is a young girl who has never slept in her life). Insomniacs, she is told, are unearthly and mysterious, and often seem to acquire foresight; they are like trolls, like lost souls, like witches, like vampires. Sleepers cannot live with them for long, and drive them out. And so they find themselves in the Kurhus, where they wander the labyrinth of paths in the wood all night. This is horror for the connoisseur. Aickman was a magnificent writer of short fiction at its most unsettling and uncanny – in the Freudian sense of not being at home with oneself. Caught in the right mood, his stories are unforgettable. Faber recently did the world the inestimable service of bringing many of his books back into print.

                                                                         MR ARCULARIS

A middle-aged Harvard professor, recovering from surgery, takes a voyage to Europe on a ship which, he learns, is also carrying a corpse home to Ireland. The ship is fogbound, surrounded by icebergs. Mr Arcularis begins to dream that he is walking through the stars, and starts sleepwalking. He is constantly cold. On board the ship, he meets people who remind him of other people: a travelling companion who looks like a woman he met at the hospital; a doctor who looks like his father. He encounters a chess-playing clergyman. He keeps hearing the same piece of music over and over again. Conrad Aiken's dazzlingly literary story is in a tradition of metaphysical sea-stories, from Poe to Melville to Conrad. Aiken was a distinguished poet and a friend of TS Eliot, with whom he shares a Modernist sense of contemporary humanity as the walking dead. Profoundly frightening (especially for middle-aged professors) and unbearably sad.