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The Unsettled Dust

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The Unsettled Dust

By: Robert Aickman
Narrated by: Reece Shearsmith
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About this listen

Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories in which strange things happen that the reader is unable to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged, but all have the same thing in common: they are brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our piece of mind actually is.

The Unsettled Dust, The House of the Russians, No Stronger Than a Flower, The Cicerones and Ravissante first appeared in the Sub Rosa collection in 1968, but the stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990. Aickman received the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for The Stains, which first appeared in the anthology New Terrors (1980), as well as the posthumous collection of Aickman's short stories, Night Voices (1985).

  • The Unsettled Dust
  • The Houses of the Russians
  • No Stronger Than a Flower
  • The Cicerones
  • The Next Glade
  • Ravissante
  • Bind Your Hair
  • The Stains

Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914 in London. In 1951, he published his first ghost stories in a volume called We Are the Dark, written in conjunction with Elizabeth Jane Howard, then went on to publish eleven further volumes of horror stories, two fantasy novels and two volumes of autobiography. Dubbed ‘the supreme master of the supernatural’, he won a World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award for his short fiction, and also edited the first eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Aside from his writing, Aickman was passionate about preserving British canals and founded the Inland Waterways Association in 1946. He died in February 1981.

Reece Shearsmith is a talented actor and writer. He is most famous for co-writing and starring in the award-winning The League of Gentlemen, along with Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss, and Jeremy Dyson. In 2009, Shearsmith and Pemberton won Best New Comedy at the 2009 British Comedy Awards for Psychoville. Reece Shearsmith has just finished filming Ben Wheatley's horror A Field in England, out in July 2013.

©1990 Robert Aickman (P)2013 Audible Ltd Anthologies & Short Stories Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Paranormal Haunted Ghost Scary Short Story

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Critic reviews

"I think that Aickman is one of those authors that you respond to on a very primal level. Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished, but I don't know if he was holding a key in the hand to begin with. I find myself admiring everything he does from an auctorial standpoint. And I love it as a reader. He will bring on atmosphere. He will construct these perfect, dark, doomed little stories, what he called 'strange stories’" (Neil Gaiman)

"We are all potential victims of the powers Aickman so skilfully conjures and commands" (Robert Bloch)

"This century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories" (Peter Straub)

"Superb tales of suspenseful unease... a contemporary master of the genre" (Publishers Weekly)

"Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever… His tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through my head at the most unlikely moments" (Russell Kirk)

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Unfortunately, Robert Aikman seems to have been one of those writers too concerned with being 'literary' to tell a good story well. His prose is so wordy, full of extraneous detail and at times so pretentious that the listener's mind has wandered long before the nub of the story has been reached. Reece Shearsmith's sometimes stumbling narration is more the fault of the writer than of the reader himself.

Over done yet under done

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i didn't like this collection as much as I liked Cold Hand in Mine. I quite like the first two stories, and was quiteblown away by the final story (The Stains), but the rest of the stories failed to engage me - I don't even remember what they were about anymore. That being said, I think it's worth picking up this collection if only to read The Stains, which is simply one of the best stories I've ever seen.

The narrator read the stories perfectly - he has a way of reading that sounds more like thinking out loud than reading. Listening to him makes me forget I'm listening to an audiobook at all - I just feel like I'm listening to my own thoughts in my own head. This makes these stories extremely immersive.

mixed bag

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absolutely love the combination of Spearsmiths
excellent narration of Robert Aickmans audible
collection of short stories of the strange weird and ghostly , quintessentially english ,very original .
this is my third volume of Aickman's stories
wonderful stuff and no mistake

Aickman and Spearsmith

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Some of the stories are late Aickman and consequently strangely off-hand and elliptical: but RS does his considerable best with them, teasing out what does not spring from the page when read to ineself. 'Ravissante' is exquisite, however. And 'The Unsettled Dust', along with Aickman's 'The Inner Room', is one of the greatest gjost stories ever written. All so much better than the overrated academic flummery of M.R.James.

Magnificent.

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Great stories and it's reece shearsmith reading it but feels like it's his 1st read at times, mis-spoken words that he corrects and should have been edited out have been left in and there is the occasional noise of paper being moved around. A great performance but poor editing at times. overall doesn't spoil things but if it was as good as reeces performance (looking at you, sound engineers) it would be amazing. I own the wine dark sea which, to me, is just as good and this review applies to that too. I have no interest in returning the books just a tad disappointed with the editing at times. Please read more books Mr shearsmith!

Good and bad things going on

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The stories are mysterious and unsettling, rather than outright scary, so great for people wanting to get into the genre. Reece Shearsmith is a master story teller and this collection really shines under his narration.

Unsettling stories narrated by a master

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Aickman called his tales "strange stories" and that is a far more helpful description than any other. Some people hear him described as a "master of horror" or "terror" and expecting something in the style of Robert Bloch or James Herbert are then disappointed by stories which are rather literary, subtly disquieting and generally lacking in overt gore.
There has been a resurgence of interest in Aickman's work in the UK in recent years and part of the reason for this has been the championing of it by the 'League of Gentlemen' team, so it is no surprise to find one of them, Reece Shearsmith, reading this collection.
Shearsmith recounted in a recent interview that the sound recordist said to him, "you're really acting them, aren't you?" about these sessions and he does try hard to give each story a distinct character and to differentiate characters within the stories. Aickman isn't the easiest writer to read aloud: some of his sentences do meander on and there are occasions when the reader sounds as if he's expecting a sentence to end then hurriedly has to adjust his inflection to fit in another clause or two, but overall Shearsmith's obvious enthusiasm and sympathy for the work more than compensates for the very occasional misplaced emphasis and his natural educated Yorkshire accent fits most of the stories very well.
My favourite of Aickman's stories are his most distinctive: while he can do a traditional ghost story, as in the title story and some of his works are clearly allegorical such as, 'No Stronger Than a Flower' his best stories are impossible to categorise cleanly.
In 'Ravissante' the narrator meets a young couple, a man who has abandoned painting to edit art books and his mysterious, taciturn wife. After the man's death the narrator is appointed his executor and discovers a manuscript detailing how the deceased had travelled to study the works of his artistic heroes and had a highly disturbing encounter with the widow of one of them. Is she, or the adopted daughter she describes but we never see, some kind of malevolent spirit destroying artists across generations? And is the widow of the artist turned publisher the same being?
Similarly in the final, and longest, story in this collection, 'The Stains' a senior civil servant recovering after the death of his wife goes to stay with his brother, a clergyman and amateur expert on lichens in northern England. Walking on the moors he embarks on a passionate affair with a mysterious young woman who may be a nymph - or, as we are given reasons to suspect, a figment of the alcoholic civil servant's imagination? And just what do the lichens represent symbolically?
Aickman's best stories are beautiful, rich and puzzling: they don't have solutions; they pose questions and as a result they are ideally suited to multiple readings or listenings

Strange Stories Indeed

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All the stories, but especially the first and last, are fascinating. They are also beautifully read. I'm not usually a fan of audio books but the narration of these stories really adds something special.

Beautiful and unsettling

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A couple of the stories start out with real promise, but they never quite deliver on it. After a bit just got to be more of the same weirdness, without any real resolution and therefore, any point.
Many people seem to love this book, but I just didn't really get it and was never able to immerse myself in the story.
L

Atmospheric, but ultimately a bit tedious

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