Tartarus Press

publishers

Night Voices

by

Robert Aickman

 

Introduction by Barry Humphries

 

Night Voices is the last, posthumously published collection of ‘strange stories’ by Robert Aickman (1914-1981). On the jacket of the first edition (1985) Aickman is quoted as saying, rather disingenuously: ‘I do not regard my work as fantasy. I try to depict the world as I see it.’ As Barry Humphries explains in his Introduction to this collection, Aickman’s fiction ‘... captures the very texture of a bad dream which may start, as such dreams do, beguilingly; until the dreamer (and reader) feels the first presentiment of encroaching nightmare—and cannot wake.’

 

Aickman also claimed that ‘the true ghost story is akin to poetry’. In blurring genres and literary forms, the fantastic is present in his work; never more so than in his extraordinary novella, ‘The Model’, also posthumously published (1987), and included in this edition of Night Voices.

 

Also reprinted are Aickman’s ‘An Essay’, written on winning the first World Fantasy Award in 1976, and his Introductions to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories series, which he edited. In ‘Robert Remembered’, author Ramsey Campbell concludes this volume with memories of his friend.

 

Contents: ‘Foreword’ by Barry Humphries, 'The Stains', 'Just a Song at Twilight', 'Laura', 'Rosamund’s Bower', 'Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale', 'The Model', 'An Essay', 'Introductions to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories', 'Robert Remembered’ by Ramsey Campbell. This printing adds 'The Coffin House' and 'The Fully-Conducted Tour' from The Strangers.

 

Cover artwork by Stephen J Clark of The Singing Garden.

 

Also available:

We Are for the Dark (with Elizabeth Jane Howard)

Dark Entries

Powers of Darkness

Sub Rosa

Cold Hand in Mine

Tales of Love and Death

Intrusions

Night Voices

Go Back At Once

Selected Letters to Kirby McCauley

 

see also: Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography by R.B. Russell

 

Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales: