Insufficient Answers

Gary William Crawford's Gothic Press, which published Akin to Poetry a couple of years ago, has issued another chapbook on Robert Aickman. Insufficient Answers contains three essays by Rebekah Memel Brown, Isaac Land and myself. Both of my co-contributors have examined Aickman from a social and historical perspective: Brown's essay "Am I a Woman?" considers his early story "The Trains" in terms of the changing role of women in the aftermath of the Second World War; while Land's "Orphans of the Social Storm" looks at the ways in which Aickman's political views informed his fiction, and provides a fascinating corrective to those who, like myself, have tended to regard the political content of the stories as largely incidental. My own piece analyses Aickman's most anthologised story, "Ringing the Changes".