Eerie and plausible …

… The Void Behind the Face of Order: Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… For [Aikman], the word “strange” seems to have been heavy with meaning. In one of the stories collected here, Aickman points out that strangeness “only happens when you’re not looking.” Perhaps it is something like Freud’s “uncanny” — that terrifying moment when everyday life suffers a sea change. Aickman was fascinated by incidents that rip apart the “foggy tissue of things seemingly under control,” when we glimpse “the spirit behind the appearance, the void behind the face of order.” This “foggy tissue” of rationality holds together because nothing domesticates like the conscious mind. Every decade produces its peculiar combination of the incredible, the grotesque, and the monstrous; and each new generation grows up taking those things for granted. To recover the strange means to scrape away the familiar, and it is no simple task to see again, with fresh eyes, what we witness every day.