Ligottian / Aickmanesque

An earlier contribution by me to the same thread:

For many years, Robert Aickman has been one of my four favourite fiction writers (with Elizabeth Bowen, Marcel Proust and Thomas Ligotti). His stories, for me, are not Weird in the sense of the Weird tradition but Strange/Absurd and I think Aickman has far more in common with Ligotti than he does with, say, Machen or MR James or Blackwood. It is is pointless to fathom one writer's assumed view of another writer, but to compare the works as pure texts and then release any specific genre / authorial shackles from any consideration of them. Chasing the noumenon of each canon of works. Immersing oneself in them without any didactic follow-through. My above four favourite writers are (were), of course, separate people, but their works can work better when morphed together in the mind. Aickman (for me) is one of the four cornerstones of the plinth - and other writers' texts contribute their own 'forms' to the gestalt sculpture (for all of us) eventually on that plinth.