This collection of stories mostly did not creep me out, despite the accolades of being a great horror writer. But they were certainly strange stories, as Aickman himself preferred to call them. There’s a great atmosphere in some of them, and his writing is careful and precise. Somebody else described the atmosphere in some of the stories as “reality out of joint”, and that’s definitely true — for these characters, ostensibly belonging to our normal world, something jolts out of place and everything is made strange by it. Even some quite mundane details can become more threatening in that atmosphere.
I’m not in a wild hurry to read more of Aickman’s work, but I wouldn’t say no, either — maybe I’ll pick up more of it from the library, and give his novels a try.
Rating: 3/5
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