Reviews

• absolutely brilliant-no pastiche- original creations.i would love to see a similar tribute to walter de la mare

• I love the works of Aickman, but I was a little reticent to buy this collection because I feared it would just be a pastiche. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the vast majority of these stories are imbued with the destructive styles and voices of their various contemporary authors, while still clearly evoking the subtle influences of Aickman. Readers not familiar with Aickman's style may be a little frustrated by some of these stories, because they mostly lack clear-cut plots and often leave a lot of major questions unanswered. However, for those readers who are comfortable with ambiguity, and who enjoy stories that are suffused with mystery and barely tangible suggestions, this collection will be very rewarding and if you are already an Aickman fan I highly recommend this collection; especially since it may help you to discover some wonderful new authors.

• Enjoyed the book. Overall good read. Most stories well written but a few were overly long and or boring and not fun.

• I may be wrong but this is possibly the first multi-authored anthology of explicitly Aickman-connected stories that have deliberately been put together as such with his name in its overall title. If so, it is certain to make literary history. Deservedly so, as it happens. The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here. Above is its conclusion.

• This collection of stories written after the style of Robert Aickman didn't impress me much. In the forward, editor Simon Strantzas (who is himself a writer of horror and weird stories of some note) takes pains to stress that the writers of the stories in this collection aren't trying to write like Aickman but rather are inspired by him. Okay, but the stories are still a sad contrast to those of Aickman himself, so much so that they serve to delineate just what a master Aickman really was. When you compare his brilliant stories such as "The Swords" or "Ringing the Changes" to these, well, let's just say that suddenly ending a story with an unexplained comment or throwing together a bunch of inexplicable occurrences does not make even a good story much less one that can stand any comparison to those of Aickman. The best story here was the last one, "The Book That Finds You," by Lisa Tuttle. The rest I found forgettable and my advice to any author asked to write a story for a similar collection would be to run for the hills.

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