Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together
eight stories in which strange things happen that the reader is unable
to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged, but all
have the same thing in common: they are brought to the brink of an abyss
that shows how terrifyingly fragile our piece of mind actually is.
The Unsettled Dust, The House of the Russians, No Stronger Than a
Flower, The Cicerones and Ravissante first appeared in the Sub Rosa
collection in 1968, but the stories were published together as The
Unsettled Dust in 1990. Aickman received the British Fantasy Award in
1981 for The Stains, which first appeared in the anthology New
Terrors (1980), as well as the posthumous collection of Aickman's short
stories, Night Voices (1985).
- The Unsettled Dust
- The Houses of the Russians
- No Stronger Than a Flower
- The Cicerones
- The Next Glade
- Ravissante
- Bind Your Hair
- The Stains
Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914 in London. In 1951, he published
his first ghost stories in a volume called We Are the Dark, written in
conjunction with Elizabeth Jane Howard, then went on to publish eleven
further volumes of horror stories, two fantasy novels and two volumes of
autobiography. Dubbed 'the supreme master of the supernatural', he won a
World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award for his short fiction, and
also edited the first eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost
Stories. Aside from his writing, Aickman was passionate about
preserving British canals and founded the Inland Waterways Association
in 1946. He died in February 1981.
Reece Shearsmith is a talented actor and writer. He is most famous for
co-writing and starring in the award-winning The League of Gentlemen,
along with Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss, and Jeremy Dyson. In 2009,
Shearsmith and Pemberton won Best New Comedy at the 2009 British Comedy
Awards for Psychoville. Reece Shearsmith has just finished filming Ben
Wheatley's horror A Field in England, out in July 2013.
