Compulsory games : and other stories / Robert Aickman ; edited by Victoria Nelson.

Compulsory games -- Hand in glove -- Marriage -- Le miroir -- No time is passing -- Raising the wind -- Residents only -- Wood -- The strangers -- The coffin house -- Letters to the postman -- Laura -- The fully-conducted tour -- A disciple of Plato -- Just a song at twilight..

"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"--