Eileen is, at first, the pitiable one, a widow whose loneliness, Colin thinks, “included the demanding element that loneliness fosters.” Gradually, allegiances within the triangle shift. Colin is employed “with a large firm,” Grace has “a quiet little job,” and Eileen is a senior civil servant.

In the title story, a married couple, Colin and Grace Trenwith, living in London, entertain their solitary neighbor, Eileen McGrath.

A couple of these latter stories make “Compulsory Games” more uneven than it might have been. Now NYRB Classics has issued a new selection, “ Compulsory Games,” which brings together eight Aickman stories not republished by Faber with four that went unpublished during his lifetime. To mark the centenary of Aickman’s birth, in 2014, Faber & Faber reissued his collection “ Cold Hand in Mind,” from 1975, alongside three additional volumes, containing around half of the extant stories. (The two writers were, for a time, also lovers.) He published six more books of “strange stories”-his preferred descriptor-before his death, in 1981. But, quietly, and at an unhurried pace, these modest scenes are infected by miasmas that feel both existential and supernatural, and which linger, for the reader as much as for the characters, like the ineradicable tint of certain dreams.Īickman was born in London, in 1914, and made a relatively late literary début, at age thirty-seven, with “ We Are For the Dark,” a volume that combined three of his stories with three by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Somewhere on a Mediterranean-seeming island, an English couple buys a parcel of land. A newly elected councillor is appointed to a committee that oversees maintenance of the local cemetery. Two young women picnic near a country churchyard. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.Not a lot tends to happen in a story by Robert Aickman. 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. 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. James and you might end up with a writer like Robert Aickman, though his self-described 'strange stories' remain confoundingly and uniquely his own.

Compulsory games robert aickman