The best and most interesting stories by Robert Aickman, a master of the
supernatural tale, the uncanny, and the truly weird. Cross Henry James with
M.R. James and you might end up with a writer like Robert Aickman, though
his self-described strange stories remain confoundingly and uniquely his
own. Aickman's 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? Do 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, this collection offers a generous introduction to a sophisticated,
psychologically acute modernist whose achievements have too long been
hidden under the cloak of genre--