Strangers and Pilgrims

"De La Mare made his name as a poet, but he wrote quite a lot of weird fiction, and it doesn’t get quite as much attention as it might. I think he’s every bit as great as Aickman or Machin. He was a poet, so he had an extraordinary gift for language, and he certainly took his time writing stories. There was no dashing through one of his stories; the aesthetic confidence and control that he has is perfect. He knows exactly what he’s doing, all the time. He’s a good example of stories that are very normal for the most part, in undramatic settings – and at the end, it’s kind of hard to say what just happened. It’s not quite like Aickman, who really leans into making everything highly ambiguous and raising as many questions as possible. De La Mare isn’t as compulsive about that… Because he’s a poet, his stuff is fantastic when you read it out loud. He had that poetic ear for language and for sound, and for particularly ominous and suggestive dialogue. There’s a BBC short series with an adaptation of “Seton’s Aunt”, narrated by Toby Jones. The story is framed around this sinister relative who may be a witch; hearing Toby Jones doing this vocal drag as Seton’s Aunt is a true delight. The magic of De La Mare’s stories is that they always go on a little longer than they should, and you’re always a little confused as to why it’s still going – but there’s something about that, and the way his characters are too comfortable with the weird things that have happened, and perhaps not fully acknowledging them. It seems like it’s a dodge – but that’s what people do. They run away from the weird, scary things that happen to them. Those endings are justified because they capture that smoothing over and forgetting and blurring. Propriety is maintained. There’s something very arch about that observation. So, as a weird fiction writer, his stuff is among the subtlest, but it gives you more opportunity to mull it over. His stories hang in the air after you’re done, and you keep thinking about them and wondering, “What was that exactly?” It’s very easy to baffle people by throwing in a bunch of random stuff. It’s very hard to baffle people in a way that they won’t find unsatisfying. If you can baffle people and they come away feeling like they enjoyed what you just did, then you really won. I’ll mention David Lynch here. You may not understand what’s happening in his films, but that adds to your appreciation rather than detracting from it. That’s very hard to do. Most people, when they don’t understand something, tune it out. Keeping people intrigued requires a certain gift. I know I selected this collection of short stories, but I could also put in a plug for his novels. He wrote one called The Return , which is really strange. This guy falls asleep next to a 16th-century alchemist’s tomb, and when he wakes up, he’s the alchemist, or at least he thinks he is, but he still looks like himself, and he still talks like himself. Is he possessed? Is he crazy? Well, people don’t go crazy like that – in a way, he’s just decided, “You know what, I’m not who I said. I’m somebody else now.” So what happens if you just arbitrarily do that? The other one is called Memoirs of a Midget , and it’s the life story of a woman who’s impossibly small. It’s not an exceptionally peculiar idea on its face, but it’s quite a thick book, and I like the wilful displacement of perspective to an odd angle for chapter after chapter. You won’t read anything else like it. Yes. Like Joan Aiken: she wrote some good weird fiction as well as her children’s books. We know her for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but I hadn’t realized for years that that’s part of a whole series with an alternate history of Britain in it. I’ll put in a quick plug for a story she did called “The Lodgers”, which is a great little piece of weird fiction. She’s unsung as a weird fiction writer."