It is always a good thing to have an affordable sampler of
the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman available again from a mainstream
publisher. I say sampler because this
selection is not a “best of” volume. Indeed, Aickman’s most celebrated
stories are not included here. Compulsory Games contains fifteen
stories, plus an introduction by editor Victoria Nelson. The story selection
was limited, as Nelson admits, to stories not included in the Faber four-volume
set issued in 2014; that is, stories not in Dark
Entries (originally 1964), Cold Hand
in Mine (originally 1975), The
Wind-Dark Sea (a 1990 U.K. abridgement of the 1988 U.S. compilation,
which was kind-of a posthumous best-of collection), and The Unsettled Dust (a 1990 U.K. compilation that takes the stories
omitted from the 1988 The Wine-Dark Sea
and adds to it). These Faber volumes are
devoid of bibliographical and copyright details. So too Compulsory
Games, the new compilation from New York Review Books, which confusingly
claims the stories © 2016 by the Estate of Robert Aickman, yet notes the
selection is © 2018 by NYREV, Inc. This cavalier
attitude towards essential information is really frustrating.
As to the stories themselves, four of them (“The Strangers,”
“The Coffin House,” “A Disciple of
Plato,” and “The Fully-Conducted Tour”) come from the 2015 Tartarus Press volume, The Strangers and Other Writings, a kind of mop-up Aickman collection,
including previously unpublished materials, limited to 450 hardcover copies. So
it’s good to see some of this rare material made available again, and in a
readily available trade paperback.
The presentation is nice, and the editor’s introduction is
adequate, if a bit sniffy at times—Nelson begins with a claim that any Aickman
story is “unshaped by the procrustian bed of genre”—something that is simply
not true, for Aickman himself was clearly very well-read in the genre, though
in his own writings he deliberately struck out on his own. He developed his own
rules and style, but he was still certainly shaped by his thorough reading of the
genre. (The anxiety of genre also shows
up in John Darnielle’s blurb on the rear cover of the book.) Nelson also makes note of some interesting features in what
she calls Aickman country.
Nelson’s 2001 volume The
Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press) was an eclectic and
interesting look at how views of the supernatural permeate modern culture. Nelson recently published a list of the "10 Scariest Horror Stories" which includes Aickman's "The Trains" as number 1. Read the piece here.
Compulsory Games is
published in the U.S. on May 8th and can be ordered from Amazon.com ($17.99), and in the U.K. on June 14th from
Amazon.co.uk (£12.99).
