The Fully-Conducted Tour

 

Robert Aickman, "The Fully-Conducted Tour" in Compulsory Games edited by Victoria Nelson (New York Review of Books, 2018).

The magic of Aikman is that he always creates a pervasive and unsettling sense of wrongness that a reader just catches out of the corner of the eye. From the paperwork necessary for the tour to the flaking paint and general untidiness of the manor to the lack of any commentary on an ornate door by a tour guide who has been otherwise thorough, all this contributes to a strange atmosphere wrapped around the theme of being left behind.

The thought of being left behind has a strong emotional valence for human beings. It can be a source of fear and alienation but also a source of relief. Like hanging out at the back of a fully conducted tour, we both want to be alone and part of the group. As our protagonist faces being left behind by his wife, who is dying of a terminal illness, he leaves his wife behind at the hotel to tour an old Italian villa alongside a group of elderly foreign tourists beginning to be left behind by the changing world. The tour ends (or just stops) with a remarkably eerie climax leaving our protagonist sitting on an uncomfortable bench surrounded by discarded footwear.

Comments

Post a Comment

What did you think about this story?

Popular posts from this blog

Children of the Night

Image
Stephen Graham Jones, "Children of the Night" in  Screams From the Dark , ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor Publishing Group: 2022). This is a story involving the literal collision of subculturesă…ˇbigfoot hunters, truckers, and monsters.  Tol's theories and speculations about monsters are wonderfully absurd, but the truth is stranger and even more ridiculous. When monster kinds cooperate with one another, we don't have a chance against them.
Read more

The Smell of Waiting

Image
Kaaron Warren, "The Smell of Waiting" in  Screams From the Dark , ed. Ellen Datlow (Tor Publishing Group: 2022). This story has a different take on returning the dead to life. Life isn't something to be restored, but rather, death is a thing or a presence that can be taken away. Of course, once you've taken it away, you've got to store it somewhere! What did you think about the role that Andrea played in the process as opposed to the role that the dog played in the process?
Read more

The Night Ocean

Image
R.H. Barlow with H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean" in The Californian vol. 4, no. 3 (Winter 1936). Read the story here at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive This is a spectacular study of the weirdness evoked by the ocean, particularly the ocean at night. Barlow describes the effects of the sea on our conceptions of self as he recounts an extended stay at a lonely beach house just outside the town of Ellston. The language, the themes, and the way this story's elements work together make it one of the best Lovecraft collaborations ever published.   Human beings have a primal and deep psychological connection to the ocean. As a source of fear, awe, and beauty, the sea represents the unknown, the vast, and the source from which all life evolved. In this story, Barlow handles a well-worn theme of cosmic horror—that is, our insignificance—in a thought-provoking way that manages not to just repeat the same genre theme we've come to expect from cosmicism. Sure the night ocean has th
Read more