RaveThe Guardian (UK)\"The novel is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit, moving between Holly in the present and each of the Harrises’ victims over the years. Each capture is evoked in devastating detail ... Lyrical and horrifying, Holly is a hymn to the grim pursuit of justice. The detective’s dogged search for truth drives the book; Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Trump and the 6 January insurrection are all persistent themes. Even the Harrises are railing against the injustices of time and age. And the novel itself is striving towards an expulsion of poison, and a healing.\
Robert Aickman
MixedThe Times (UK)Robert Aickman’s hitherto unpublished second novel, written in 1975, is an oddity, a puzzle box of queerness and a utopian fantasia ... The unsettled, dreamlike quality of [one] section is exacerbated by the odd way that time moves in the book, with years taking place over the course of a few pages, yet most of the second half of the novel being taken up with just three days ... The novel gives the constant, frustrating impression that its real purpose runs just beneath the surface, guessed at, but impossible to seize. The prose vibrates with energy—however, the overall result is meandering, without focus. The uncanny streak that characterises Aickman’s other work is discernible here and perhaps it’s in these hints, which come to fruition in his other works, that the novel’s main interest lies. In isolation,Go Back at Once is no more than a curiosity with the air of a fever dream, but it might encourage readers to seek out Aickman’s richer, stranger fruit, his short story collections Dark Entries and The Unsettled Dust which shaped the path of 20th-century uncanny writing.
