![]() In the truly terrifying ""Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen,"" a recluse falls in love with a woman who repeatedly telephones him. In the title story, for instance, an upperclass Englishman (the social strata that spawns nearly all of Aickman's heroes) becomes obsessed with a shunned Grecian island landing there in a stolen dinghy, he finds a trio of self-proclaimed ""sorceresses"" who transport him to a seemingly Edenic life-but why does the surrounding sea begin to glow blood-red? In ""The Stains,"" a man happens upon an untutored woman in the countryside as he romances and weds her, the lichenous stain on her body disappears even as a similar stain grows on his. Their terrors arise from a flow of fearful incongruities that culminate not in shock but in a freezing sense of wrongness. ![]() James, Aickman never resorts to gore, raw sex, or classic monsters in these tales. A meticulous craftsman grounded in the school of subtle horrors founded by Henry and M.R. ![]() Peter Straub introduces this volume by writing: ""Robert Aickman at his best was this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories."" Proof? This collection of 11 tales (many new to the US) in which Aickman, an Englishman who died in 1983, is at his very best. ![]()
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