Compulsory Games [Paperback]

The best and most interesting stories by Robert Aickman, a master of the supernatural tale, the uncanny, and the truly weird.

Robert Aickman’s self-described “strange stories” are confoundingly and uniquely his own. These superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the “void behind the face of order,” is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian: Is that river the Thames, or is it even a river? What does it mean when a prospective lover removes one dress, and then another—and then another? Does a herd of cows in a peaceful churchyard contain the souls of jilted women preparing to trample a cruel lover to death? Published for the first time under one cover, the stories in this collection offer an unequaled introduction to a profoundly original modern master of the uncanny.Compulsory Gamesby Robert Aickman
 
PROVISIONAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
 
Compulsory Games
Le Miroir
Raising the Wind
Residents Only
Hands in Glove
Wood
Laura
Just a Song at Twilight
Letters to the Postman
Marriage
No Time Is Passing
The Strangers
The Fully-Conducted Tour
A Disciple of Plato
The Coffin House 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. —Neil Gaiman

In Aickman's fiction, peculiarity is intertwined with a drab twentieth-century realism that is very English and sometimes dryly funny. Think Philip Larkin, or Barbara Pym, gone eldritch. —Anwen Crawford,The New Yorker

“Aickman was a master of the 'strange story’ whose nearly unclassifiable output relies neither on ghosts nor creaking castles. Each story in this collection is a small masterpiece ofl³Y