A mixed collection. Some of the stories--"Compulsory Games," "Hand in Glove," "Marriage," "Wood," "Laura," and "No Time Is Passing"--are quite good; others--"The Coffin House," "A Disciple of Plato"--I found dreadful; and a couple--"Residents Only" and "The Strangers"--were too long to sustain any sense of the strange that one comes to Aickman for.

Some of these stories I loved, others I was merely confused. Many were 5 stars but some were 2 or 3. Overall though the 5s far out-weighed the 2s and 3s so I'm giving an average of 4 stars.

About halfway through, these stories really read like lesser Aickman to me. I don't expect every Aickman piece to be near the level of Ravissante, but most of these have been quite a slog. The exception is "Wood", but one has to suffer through the rambling opening section to get to the rather lovely and ambiguous end.Update: "The Strangers" certainly has many charming moments, but is again too long. "Letters to the Postman" and "Laura" both have ordinary English dudes chasing femme fatales, a co...

Loved these, especially the ones that had less gothic material and more straight out buggery.

There are two broad methods for reading Aickman. The first, and most common that I have seen, is to read him as something akin to horror. The exact sub-genre or flavor of which is debated: ranging from ghost stories blended with surrealism to psychological horror bordering on magical realism [and most stops in-between]. The fact he is often assigned to distinctly genre fiction, and distinctly horror at that, is testified by numerous witnesses: see the bookcovers of the recent Faber paperbacks, t...

To call those short stories strange is to undersell them. They are beyond strange, yet they are about the human condition. There are also murdering cows. How cool is that? They might not be really cows. The cows are in the short story “Hand and Glove”. There are mushrooms. In many of the stories, a theme is love and/or marriage. The relationships are never quite what they at first appear to be. But the language and writing are beautiful.

It's become increasingly rare for me to encounter an entirely unknown (to me, at least) author who manages to impress me to the degree that Aickman has with these stories. They're beautifully written, of course, but what gets to me is the sustained mood, one that I can only describe as deeply unsettling.It's ostensibly horror, or perhaps fantasy, but it's not much like other works in that genre. There is the hallucinatory feel of Kafka or Ishiguro. But what I find remarkable is how subtly the un...

Aickman is a fabulous, inventive, peculiar writer, and this collection of his short fiction is so good I’m going to write a paragraph talking about what I don’t like about it. Aickman’s pattern in most of these are, basically –> individual in a highly charged emotional situation + uncanny or surreal situation = mysterious denouement which deliberately fails to clarify things. Sometimes this works marvelously, with the peculiar subtleties of each story’s theme submerged in rhyming narrative madne...

Probably a 3.5 in all honesty, but "Wood" is one of his best tales and not one I'd seen anywhere else. The title story and "Marriage" are also fine showings, if not quite on the same level. "The Strangers" has a lot to offer as well, even if by the end it feels a bit desultory. Overall, it's not the volume I'd recommend for beginners (that's probably Cold Hand in Mine), or even the runner-up, but it's well-worth buying if you enjoy Aickman and are used to those aspects of his work that can genui...

http://www.oddlyweirdfiction.com/2018...With two exceptions, I loved the stories in this book, which were darkly bizarre, surreal, and in some cases just plain weird. Then again, those qualities are part of the reason I'm drawn to Aickman, who I personally believe was a genius writer, well ahead of his time. Just recently I told someone who'd never read an Aickman story that while reading this author's work, don't go looking for the weird, the strange, or the horror in his work, because it will

I would say that most of these stories are second and third-tier Aickman. Certainly these are not as good as those found in "The Wine-Dark Sea" or "Dark Entries" and not even close to what I'd consider the most essential collections "Cold Hand in Mine" and "The Unsettled Dust." That isn't to say there's not a few great Aickman stories here."Wood" is an incredible story, easily in company with his best work. "The Strangers" is also excellent and maintains a decent sense of unease despite its long...

This book endeavours to collect together the Robert Aickman stories not included in the currently available 4 volume Faber set – which includes two greatest hits collections. Though this is a great initiative, it does inevitably mean that some of the inclusions here are far from top drawer.There are fifteen stories, six of which I would consider to be amongst Aickman’s best, and so make this volume a worthy purchase. These are sadly balanced by a further six (usually shorter ones) which frankly

Apparently this book is "intended" to work as an introduction to Aickman's "strange world" of his "strange stories". Most of the readers would say (have said) that this is subpar compared to the other four collections made accessible by Faber & Faber. This being my step into his works, I'm quite sure enough now to say that I could've picked one from those four, for a better "introduction".I liked the stories, except two, one of which I didn't even finish, but will sometime later perhaps, one bei...

After eagerly awaiting this collection for months, it was inevitably going to fall short of exaggerated expectations, but many stories here, including the title story, "Hand in Glove," "Marriage," and "Wood," are among Aickman's best, and several others, like "No Time is Passing," "The Coffin House," and "Just a Song at Twilight" are very good, indeed; unfortunately, a few, including "Residents Only" and "The Strangers" are not only somewhat dull, but are also rather unbearably long, so that wha...

One reviewer on here called Compulsory Games a “best of the rest” collection of stories that didn’t make it into the Faber reissues. The book itself seems to be aware of this, as Victoria Nelson’s introduction acknowledges the Faber reissues and considers this as a sort of response to those editions. If that’s the case, its a shame that are still quite a few Aickman stories floating in space out there that haven’t been collected in a reissue.As fans of him know, Aickman’s writing embodies the “j...

Robert Aickman calls his stories strange. The short and longer pieces collected in COMPULSORY GAMES were often categorized as horror. I think one story ends with a chill, but most of them just peter out. They’re certainly weird but no more so than when you’re at the DMV and the guy behind the counter has a mole so big and hairy you think it looks like your uncle, then you hear your uncle's voice in your head and you remember what a bore he is, but before you can say anything your license has bee...

Although this is somewhat of a ‘best of the rest’ anthology of Aickman's strange stories—i.e. those that haven’t been collected in the Faber paperbacks—this is still an excellent collection, highly recommended to existing and new Aickman readers alike. Some stories here are quite accessible by Aickman's standards, such as the straightforward horror of ‘Le Miroir’ and ‘The Coffin House’. Others such as ‘Hand in Glove’ and ‘No Time is Passing’ are Aickman at his enigmatic best. All things consider...

A collection of eerie short stories. Most of them are dream-like in how they juxtapose the quotidian with the unexpected and sometimes unnatural. The last story in the book, "Just a Song at Twilight", encapsulates this well. It's set on some unnamed, indeterminately foreign island, but paints a very precise picture of a young married couple feuding over an uncomfortable drive. They move into their new house only to find that the beach access has been closed off by barbed wire. As they sit down f...

Read the first of these and skimmed through a couple later. There was something clearly wrong as the quality of the pieces was miles worse than Sub Rosa. I confirmed through other GR reviews that this is Robert Aickman at his worst, apparently. It's amazing though to read the reviews of this especially in the New Yorker, by people unfamiliar with the writer. It shows how little you can trust media reviews of books. Goodreads has become a sort of Rotten Tomatoes for me.