i forgot to say - what i enjoyed even more about reading the visiting star: finding a collated series of posts from one of the aickman usenet groups on the story, and finding three pages "appended" to the story. it seems the story that we have in print is incomplete. the collator, being drunk at the time, misplaced the final three pages of the story before the book was to go to press and the first run carried the story in this form with no one being any the wiser. aickman himself appeared to have been "secretly amused" and to have considered the inadvertently-truncated version superior to his original, and in all subsequent editions (during and after his lifetime) the story continued to be reprinted in this form, a non-authorial mistake that came to be endorsed by the author. the three final pages was only recovered later from the collator's possessions.

i happily started writing an essay about the two different versions (yay, textual history!) until, gradually, more and more questions began to bothered me and it dawned on me all of this was of course - well a hoax is too strong a word, and i'm certain the author never intended to deceive ( one can't tell without seeing the original post, which may have been prefaced with explanatory remarks) and in any case it is a very delightful new ending he has written - but, alas, not authentic nonetheless, so i could not recruit it in my essay. some parts of the writing was quite aickman-like though, and i'm equally prepared to believe the frame story about the collator (because ludicrous as it may sound it is also the sort of story you could believe about aickman) but a moment's thought - and i should have thought before leaping - would have told me. there is certainly an abruptness to the end of the original ending - but then it did work very well, as well, and left a good bit to the imagination, and in any case i was used to penelope fitzgerald's guillotine endings. the three additional pages, with its careful stocktaking, seem, at this late date, more like an appendix, supplemental rather than constitutive. this plus-three "original" version of the story is also too overt with its meaning - on the other hand, it was more frightening precisely because its meaning and its darkness are both much less ambiguously articulated. and the riefenstahl connection all the more clear. if i send it out i shall send it with the three pages appended so that people can decide which they like better.