Night Voices

Introduction by Barry Humphries
Cover artwork by Stephen J Clark of The Singing Garden.

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.

Limited to 350 copies, Night Voices is a sewn hardback of 316+ vii pages, printed lithographically, with silk ribbon marker, head and tailbands, and d/w.
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