Compulsory Games

"Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully." --Neil Gaiman, The Neil Gaiman Reader

"Of all the authors of uncanny tales, Aickman is the best ever...His tales literally haunt me; his plots and his turns of phrase run through my head at the most unlikely moments." --Russell Kirk

"This century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories." --Peter Straub

"Robert Aickman has a gift for depicting the eerie areas of inner space, the churning storms and silent overcasts that engulf the minds of lonely and alienated people. He is a weatherman of the subconscious." --Fritz Lieber

"Unsettling is a key description for Aickman's writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together. The supernatural is never far from the surreal. He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of pocket watches." --Matthew Cheney, Electric Lit

"His prose style - supple, urbane, sophisticated, restrained, yet capable of surprisingly powerful emotive effects - never falters from the beginning to the end of his work. There are few writers who are as purely pleasurable to read, regardless of their subject matter or the success or failure of their actual work, as Robert Aickman." --S. T. Joshi

"To interact with Aickman on any meaningful level is to experience a form of quantum entanglement. His ideas entrain the subconscious and mutate it in the fashion that transgressive art must. And yes, I'm implying that the old boy has fucked your mind. Buttoned down or not, it's just what he liked to do." --Laid Barron, Weird Fiction Review