Compulsory Games (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Robert Aickman | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

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.

“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

“Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever…. His tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through my head at the most unlikely moments.” —Russell Kirk

“This century’s most profound writer of what we call horror stories.” —Peter Straub

“Robert Aickman has a gift for depicting the eerie areas of inner space, the churning storms and silent overcasts that engulf the minds of lonely and alienated people. He is a weatherman of the subconscious.” —Fritz Lieber