商品簡介
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.
作者簡介
The son of an architect, Robert Fordyce Aickman (1914–1981) did not attend university and subsisted on a small family income as he worked variously as a literary agent, editor, and theater and art reviewer in London. A prominent advocate for preserving England’s canals, he was a cofounder of the influential Inland Waterways Association. Besides eight volumes of published stories (one including stories written by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard) and a range of unpublished works, he wrote two memoirs, The Attempted Rescue and The River Runs Uphill.
Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her books include Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, a study of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies in 2001, and Wild California, a collection of stories. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing program.
