Three years later, the collection Compulsory Games appeared in the NYRB Classics series. That one’s widely available, but several stories included in The Strangers are missing, namely “The Case of Wallingford’s Tiger” (1936), “The Whistler” (est. 1938/39), and “The Flying Anglo-Dutchman” (1941). According to a statement by the Tartarus publisher, Aickham’s literary estate only allowed their publication for scholarly reasons, restricted to that one printing.

Which leaves four stories, the last ones to feature on this blog: the three short stories “A Disciple of Plato,” written between 1930 and 1980; “The Coffin House,” written in 1941; and “The Fully Conducted Tour,” written and recorded for BBC Radio 4 in 1976 but not broadcast, first published in 2005; and the novella “The Strangers,” written between the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The short stories are short and the remarks can be brief.

In “A Disciple of Plato,” a kind of period romance, the entire setting feels as flat as a painting before the vanishing point was invented, with thick strokes of learned expressions and interminable sentences. “The Coffin House” is the kind of horror story without narrative depth that populate high school lit mags, while “The Fully-Conducted Tour,” more advanced and more distinctly Aickmanesque, would qualify for an undergrad journal.

Finally, the novella “The Strangers.”

It’s very uneven, but an enjoyable read after all. With its density of quips and similes, it seems to be trying to channel American hardboiled fiction, only more verbose and technically unpolished. Dashes of Lovecraftian framing and a strong Poeish feel mix in with nineteenth-century novel conventions, like the overuse of first-letter-plus-m-dashes for family and location names and excessive foreshadowings which, like crying wolf too often, fail to make things more ominous after a time. But then, by way of a splendidly imaginative horror tableau around what is technically a belated first turning point but with enough punch for a midpoint, the story becomes interesting, better written, and thrilling.

“The Strangers” provides a fine closure to my Aickman journey, an amazing ride along which many of his techniques, scenes, and images succeeded in leaving lasting marks on my memory.

Aickman, Robert. The Strangers and Other Writings. Tartarus Press, 2015.
Aickman, Robert. Compulsory Games. NYRB Classics, 2018.

Yet, there’s more to the argument about post-9/11 political communication. It leads him back to Hobbes and the role of fear as the primary motivator for entering the contract (to gain protection) and keeping it (to avoid punishment), neatly encapsulated in the formula protego ergo obligo (the cogito ergo sum of the state, as Carl Schmitt has it). However, as Derrida argues, the structure established by the contract disguises its own perishability with the vocabulary of the divine, as if its structure were equally imperishable. And here, Q.E.D., the sovereign becomes exempt from the contract: Hobbes’s ultimately theological model of the political puts the sovereign outside the law, just like the beast or wolf is outside the law.

From there, Derrida rips into Hobbes’s “mediation argument” against God as a law above the law, landing on Hobbes’s double exclusion of god and the beast, where language enters the game. Both the beast and God (the sovereign’s sovereign) “do not respond,” as Hobbes argues, which can be read both in terms of response-as-speech and responsibility, which makes, for Hobbes, any covenant impossible with either.

The session concludes with final thoughts, quotations, and reading tasks in the context of contracts, particularly the “double-bind of domestication.”

Derrida, Jacques. “Second Session December 19, 2001.” In: The Beast & the Sovereign Vol.1, transl. Geoffrey Bennington. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Chicago UP: 2009.

To start with, it contains the novelette “The Trains,” published in the original collection We Are for the Dark in 1951, which I already mentioned in this context.

Then, there are the short story “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” first published in 1980, and the novelette “Rosamund’s Bower,” probably written in the late 1970s, both of which are badly written, badly edited or not edited at all, and in different ways a waste of time.

Next, there are the short stories “Just a Song at Twilight,” first published in 1965, and “Laura,” first published in 1977. Both are full of striking motifs, superbly written passages, and absolute knockout sentences, but neither of the two comes together as a structurally and thematically rounded story—they remind me of that kind of fried country potatoes often served in France which taste really good but are completely hollow inside. (As a friend of mine put it, “guess they heat up some air and wrap a fry around it.”)

Finally, there’s the novella “The Stains,” originally published in 1980, a perfect blend of psychological horror and folk horror with a terrific dramatic structure. Like in many of his best works, it’s not about the ending but the journey, and it is, as I see it, one of Aickman’s most accomplished stories.

This should be my next-to-last post on Aickman’s oeuvre; there are only some uncollected stories left, mostly juvenilia, half of which I don’t have access to in any case. (It’s become spotty, as indicated.)

As an aside, The Stains won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1981, which would impress me more if Aickman hadn’t been given the same award for the novelette “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” in 1975, which I mentioned in my post on Cold Hand in Mine. (Then again, by that time the award was still called the August Derleth Fantasy Award, which might explain things.)

As another aside, I found this terrific quote from an introduction to Aickman by Victoria Nelson: “[Aickman] loves oblique, corner-of-the-eye effects, throwaway asides that don’t bear directly on the narrative, and the fact that the uncanny lurks in the margins instead of being front and center makes it doubly unsettling.” Perfectly nails it.

Aickman, Robert. Night Voices: Strange Stories. Golancz, 1980. Reprinted with extra stuff as Night Voices in Tartarus Press, 2013.

Screenplay, dialogues, action, camera, cut, pacing, you name it, are staggeringly bad or utterly boring or both.

It achieves the impossible by letting even Christie’s performance look like a school play rehearsal.

I had no idea that having sex with an AI looks like the $4.99 Walmart version of 2001: A Space Odyssee.

Demon Seed by Donald Cammell, 1977.
Watched at the Metropol theater on May 29, 2026, in its original language.

Gyllenhaal is every damn bit as sexy as *looks at watch* twenty-five years ago.

One particularly egregious trope claws its way out of its grave toward the ending in a scene sufficiently sloppily plotted to accommodate it.

Perfect popcorn movie with franchise potential.

In the Grey by Guy Ritchie, 2026.
Watched at the Atelier theater on May 26, 2026, in its original language.

Fuck the Hero’s Journey.

Turns out, even nonsensical storefront letters aren’t genuine to AI!

Together with the artist’s-block angle, the crisis makes more sense if the initial failure is a result of Jiji’s coming of age, upon which Kiki—already fragile—panics. (This would also rhyme well with Miyazaki’s remark on that matter.)

魔女の宅急便 aka Kiki’s Delivery Service by Miyazaki Hayao, 1989.
Watched at the UFA theater on May 21, 2026, in its original language with subtitles.

Incredibly, Shue—much less experienced—matches his performance in every scene.

The 16mm handheld and the dreamy jazz score progressively intensify the feeling of drowning.

Everything, the plot, the characters, the on-location shoots, feel less real than hyperreal, perhaps in the Baudrillardian sense.

Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis, 1995.
Watched at the Bambi theater on May 20, 2026, in its original language.

“The Breakthrough” was never published in magazines nor, to my knowledge, translated into other languages, and both Gollancz’s Intrusions from 1981 and Tartarus’s The Collected Strange Stories Vol. II from 1999, where it was included, are unavailable even in public or university libraries within a 100-mile radius of where I live. What’s more, both collections were hardback exclusives, with a print run of the latter of 500 copies (plus 250 for a corrected edition in 2001), and both have been out of print now for ages. The only place where they pop up from time to time is on eBay for stratospherically extortionist prices. Thus, sadly, I have to make do without it for this review.

Well.

“No Time Is Passing” has a handful of moments where reality cracks and terror flickers up, but all in all it’s a kind of trippy trip one can’t follow without substances similar to those the protagonist enjoys.

“The Fetch” starts out as Aickman’s most Oedipal exercise yet, a field where previous stories have earned him high marks already, after which it segues into a Scottish folk horror motif. It could have been a gripping story if it weren’t for two weaknesses: Aickman’s apparent endeavor to cram a door-stopping nineteenth-century Gothic novel tome into a modern novelette, and the rushed and comprehensively bungled preparation/stage-setting the ending requires, whose intended impact therefore is considerably deflated.

For “Letters to the Postman,” two or three twists earn it some credits in the horror department, but beyond these the novelette is psychologically fully predictable from the start and from there not particularly interesting to follow.

But!

“Hand in Glove,” first published in 1979, is an excellent piece of psychological horror, where its initially soothing and dreamlike environment slowly turns out to have been beset by nightmare terrors all along, with great use of symbols and props to foreshadow each click of the ratchet.

“The Next Glade,” finally, might in the end not quite lead anywhere, but it pulls the rug of reality out from under the protagonist and the reader, incrementally and thoroughly, into a kind of “fantasy” indeed. While the naming of the protagonist and her two kids, Noelle and Agnes and Judith, respectively, is evocative of Christian myths, it seems to be rather a displacement and an—increasingly failing—suppression of archaic folk beliefs and fairy tales underneath. For the latter, elements of the various Sleeping Beauty versions come to mind in terms of what’s penetrable and what’s deadly when and for whom. Also, while the kids are not twins, there’s a point where their behavior becomes inverted as if they had swapped their respective ages. Talking of which, without aspiring to reverse-engineer the novelette’s theme at this point, “inversion” seems to be constantly played upon as an important motif, with the inverted building and the antipodal weapon as two of its most prominent markers.

Both “Hand in Glove” and “The Next Glade” don’t indulge in dainty minutiae but skillfully tell gripping stories where everything counts.

Aickman, Robert. Intrusions. Golancz, 1980. Reprint Tartarus Press, 1999 and 2001.

Like every good sequel, it’s at the same time a clever remake.

More emotional beats than expected, and with more depth than the original. (Which isn’t hard.)

Undoubtedly an excellent, technically superior blockbuster, but unlikely to become an era-defining pop culture icon like its predecessor.

Top Gun by Joseph Kosinski, 2022.
Watched at the Atelier theater on May 17, 2026, in its original language.

There’s a lot to lament about the screenplay, particularly its veritable collection of dialogue lines unsalvageable by any cast. But otherwise, I admire its gutsiness to break the mold—its dramatic development feels wonky, there’s no antagonist to speak of, there’s no early scene that signals what must be achieved for the movie to be over, or its peculiar pacing.

And you cannot even call it an action movie! Notwithstanding its dialogue hackwork, the movie is actually character-driven throughout, even if those characters are not exactly marking new Shakespearean depths. Also, sadly, or maybe even on purpose, the Cruise/McGillis pairing fails to sparkle. What does sparkle, however, and iconically so, is the Kilmer/Cruise pairing, and in its wake the general buddyness of it all. Noo Saro-Wiwa, in her excellent Guardian review, distinctly nails it: “Masculinity, Top Gun reminds us, is a horseshoe spectrum in which the gay and hyper-straight are not really so far apart.”

Finally, the cinematography is outstanding, on the ground and in the air. The aerial combat scenes—to great effect—leave you puzzled at times, but they do so on purpose when, and only when, the pilots themselves lose their bearings. Great stuff.

In the closing credits, one of the real F-14 aircrew involved in making the movie has the call sign “Rabbi,” which instantly reminded me of the aircraft carrier’s flight deck in Jim Abrahams’s 1991 spoof Hot Shots!, with its parking meters for the jets, the matador, and the high-fiving pilots in Hasidic garb.

Top Gun by Tony Scott, 1986.
Watched at the Atelier theater on May 17, 2026, in its original language.