Compulsory Games

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.