A stunning set of stories, and easily my favorite of the three Aickman collections I've read. How did he do it? These stories are a wonder to behold. To read Aickman at the height of his powers is an immensely satisfying experience. Of course even as I write this I'm cringing at the shopworn superlatives flowing from the keyboard, but I don't care (though frankly it is a bit embarrassing, given Aickman's own impeccable command of the English language). The only story here that I'd read before wa...

WOW, short story collections don't get better than this. Aickman rarely tries to truly scare his reader, he wants to unsettle the reader. These are stories I find myself thinking about, days, weeks later. Images and situations presented really get under the skin, and stay in the mind like few others. Sometimes a story will build and build, then just end. Many concepts here feel fresh and original too.I think my favorite thing though was the sense of atmosphere Aickman pours into these stories, t...

The thing I'm finding about Aickman's later and posthumous collections is they only contain reprints of stories I've already read. This is no detraction to the quality of the content, always excellent, but caveat lector. I have already read all but one of these stories here. I'm going to stick with the more expensive, way more expensive, Tartarus reprints since I can buy one of those for what it is costing me to get two of these retreads. Besides they are more beautiful to look at, keep their va...

This is the third volume of Aickman’s short stories that I’ve read, and while in personal preference I’m tempted to rank it slightly below the recent reissues of ‘Cold Hand in Mine’ and ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’, it’s still another basically peerless assortment of strange and haunting tales. There’s something about his work which seems somehow calculated to apply very specifically to my own tastes and sensibilities; each story seems enchanted with (to borrow Poe’s title) a sense of mystery and imagina...

The forth of the available Robert Aickman collections that I have read and I’m sad that it’s the last. Unusually for a book of short stories, it gets better as it goes along. The first two are great but they make use of a more conventional form than the author’s fans might be used to. It’s when things get weirder that the writing begins to soar, starting with ‘No Stronger than a Flower’, where a newlywed visits a beauty consultant and an unstoppable transformation begins. Aickman’s best stories

After finishing The Wine-Dark Sea, I went straight into The Unsettled Dust without pause, and raced through it so quickly that when I sat down to review it, I was surprised to discover it contains the same number of stories as The Wine-Dark Sea. There's a sort of unevenness about this collection - it contains some of the briefest and the longest stories I've read by Aickman; some of the most conventional and some of the most difficult to define; and throughout the book, the characters seem to be...

“There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices.”

It seems to me that Robert Aickman is the most underrated British writer of the post-war era, in any field of literature, high or low.Aickman made two mistakes, when it came to literary fame: he was a writer of short stories in an age that is too busy to read short literature; he was a writer of ‘strange’ stories, which have never appealed to highbrow critics. His work was too 'literary' for the ‘weird’ crowd; too ‘weird’ for the 'literary' crowd. And yet this split nature is what makes his stor...

This is another great collection of Aickman's stories. However, it seems odd that "The Unsettled Dust" was chosen as the title story, as it is a somewhat mundane, traditional ghost story, and not representative of Aickman's oeuvre. Not a bad story in its own right, but it feels like an avant-garde musician playing standards. The rest of the collection improves from that slow start, "The Next Glade", "Ravissante", and "Bind Your Hair" being my personal favorites. Aickman's stories are occult in t...

It’s often difficult giving a mark to a short story collection because the quality of individual stories can be wide ranging. Indeed there are eight stories here, and two of them - although not bad - fall short, for me, of Aickman’s usual excellence (‘The Houses of the Russians’ and ‘Bind Your Hair’). But, such is the sheer brilliance and originality of three others in this collection that I have no hesitation in awarding a 5.In the title story, ‘The Unsettled Dust,’ a ‘Special Duties Officer fo...

42 SHORT STORIES IN 42 DAYS*DAY 19: No Stronger Than A Flower★★★Rather far from Aickman's best, but still pretty damned good.*The rules:– Read one short story a day, every day for six weeks– Read no more than one story by the same author within any 14-day period– Deliberately include authors I wouldn't usually read– Review each story in one sentence or lessAny fresh reading suggestions/recommendations will be gratefully received 📚

Having read and quite liked "The Trains" and "Ringing the Changes", I was hoping to find a handful of great Aickman stories. This collection, although rich in atmosphere and architectural detail, was a little disappointing. The tales lack narrative and direction, thus coming across as dream sequences rather than works of fiction. This may have been Aickman's point, but it gave me the impression that they had been poorly planned or left unfinished.

I know; it's getting boring isn't it. Another Aickman collection again rated five stars. Well, what can I say? He is simply brilliant. Or perhaps it's just that he offers exactly what I'm looking for it a book; Well written prose that both delights an disturbs in equal measure. Stories that stick with you for days afterwards as you turn them over in your mind, wrestling with their meaning and intent.Thematically varied as usual, this is another quality collection showing that range of Aickman's

Having read a few of Aickman's more anthologised stories - particularly 'Stains', as perfect a weird tale as there ever was - and been impressed by them, I think I at first expected too much from this collection. As you can see, I came around to thinking very highly of it anyway, but with some reservations. Let's get those reservations out of the way. First of all, Aickman mainly deals with characters who are past their first youth, isolated and somewhat depressed. That's all very well as far as...

The Unsettled Dust contains some of my favourite Aickman stories. The Cicerones has haunted me with its subtle terror ever since I first encountered it in (I think) the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and the title story is a masterpiece of creeping unease, conjuring an unsettling atmosphere from simple resources. I came across The Stains and Bind Your Hair more recently, but they certainly made their mark. The rest of the stories here were new to me - they range from the strangely depressi...

Really recommend Robert Aickman's strange stories! He unsettles me in a similar way to Shirley Jackson. Love this kind of horror.

The Unsettled Dust (4 stars)Painfully bleak, dust-enshrouded England.The Houses of the Russians (5 stars)Eerie narrative about the buried soul of Russia; an amusing minor character (in the form of an obnoxious leftist called Rort) reinforces the strong anti-Marxist theme of this story.No Stronger Than a Flower (5 stars)A blackly humourous satire on the cosmetic industry.The Cicerones (5 stars)A short but extremely powerful story about a typical lukewarm modern man exposed to the Inexplicable in

As for this excellently entertaining collection—so eerie, imaginative, intense and fluid within such formal and elegant stylistic constraints, and in which Aickman demonstrates to the full the power of less is more, wielding ambiguity and undeclared and/or unresolved events to stir the readers mind to a roil that the author does not explicitly assist in settling; which are possessed of the dexterous ability of provoking strangeness, evoking wonder, and stoking sensuality from within a narrative

This is the second collection of Aickman's stories I've read, so this time I knew what to expect: beautiful, eerie tales of the supernatural - or not. With Aickman, you just don't know. Maybe his characters are simply delusional. Or maybe the world really is a dangerous place where at any moment you might get lured into a maze full of bodies while avoiding your in-laws, or meet weird and alluring creatures on the moor, or be cornered by strangers in a Belgian cathedral. I'll certainly be looking...

Contains much of this master of the short story's best work, from the folk horror of "Bind Your Hair" to the fungal gothic romance of "The Stains." Only the title story and "Houses of the Russians" fall short of Aickman's highest marks, and even those tales have their merits. There is no one like Aickman, and Faber are to be commended for bringing these back into print.