The Inner Room

Cover artwork by Stephen J Clark of The Singing Garden

Published in association with the Halifax Ghost Story Festival

"The Inner Room" is a classic "strange story" by Robert Aickman and is open to various interpretations. When Lene chooses an odd and awkward dolls house as a present she finds that the dolls inside are inaccessable. Later, her brother works out that the house also harbours an inaccessable "inner room".

In Aickman's stories he offers us a world in which the inexplicable, the ghostly and the macabre are manifested, but the source and meaning of such intrusions are not at all clear. Very often the explanation of events would seem to be supernatural, but this alone will not account for everything that has happened. It would appear that we should look at the mental state of Aickman’s protagonists if we are to fully understand the implications of his stories. An examination of their unconscious minds would seem to be the way forward, but neither does this approach entirely suffice. It is reasonable to assume that these two driving forces, the supernatural and the psychological, could be brought together, but the results of this are often contradictory. Aickman seems to have given us more than enough clues to the puzzles he offers in his tales, and yet they do not quite account for all that happens in them.

In association with the Halifax Ghost Story Festival, ‘The Inner Room’ is published as a trade paperback of 51pps.

Limited to 200 copies and sold out at the publisher