Fiction
Short story collections
Original collections
- Six Ghost Stories, London: Jonathan Cape, 1951 (a collection containing three stories by Elizabeth Jane Howard and three by Aickman)
- Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories, London: Collins, 1964
- Macabre Stories, London: Collins, 1966
- Strange Tales, London: Victor Gollancz, 1968
- Eight Strange Stories, London: Victor Gollancz, 1975
- Tales of Love and Death, London: Victor Gollancz, 1977
- Strange Tales, London: Victor Gollancz, 1980
- Strange Stories, London: Victor Gollancz, 1985
Reprint collections
- Painted Devils: Strange Stories, New York: Scribner's, 1979 (revised stories)
- The Wine-Dark Sea, New York: Arbor House/William Morrow, 1988
- The Unsettled Dust, London: Mandarin, 1990
- The Collected Strange Stories, Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus/Durtro, 1999 (two volumes)
Notes
Painted Devils consists of revised versions of stories which had appeared in earlier collections. August Derleth proposed that Arkham House should publish a book of Aickman's best stories, but was unable to meet the author's demands and withdrew the proposal.
Cold Hand in Mine and
Painted Devils featured dust jacket drawings by acclaimed gothic illustrator Edward Gorey. The original collections of short stories are quite scarce, though copies of the U.S. edition of
Cold Hand in Mine are very plentiful. Most of his best tales can be found in the equally affordable collections
The Wine Dark Sea,
Painted Devils, and
The Unsettled Dust.
A previously unpublished short story, "The Fully Conducted Tour", appeared in the Tartarus Press periodical
Wormwood in 2005.
Novels and novellas
Aickman's published novels were
The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) and
A Novel of the Fantastic (New York: Arbor House, 1987). The latter was a novella which had remained unpublished in his lifetime. Aickman had hoped to have had the latter work illustrated by Edward Gorey. Another novel, entitled
Go Back at Once remains unpublished. S.T. Joshi is at work on this and it may be published.
Awards
In 1975, Aickman received the World Fantasy Award for short fiction for his story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal". This story had originally appeared in February 1973 in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; it was reprinted in
Cold Hand in Mine.
In 1981, the year of his death, Aickman was awarded the British Fantasy Award for his story "The Stains", which had first appeared in the anthology
New Terrors (London: Pan, 1980), edited by Ramsey Campbell. It subsequently appeared posthumously in
Night Voices.
In 2000, the Tartarus Press' two volume
The Collected Strange Stories won the British Fantasy Award for best collection.
Nonfiction
Aickman's autobiographical writing consists of the two memoirs
The Attempted Rescue (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966) and
The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (Burton-on-Trent: Pearson, 1986). In 2001, Tartarus Press reissued the former volume in a new edition with a foreword by the writer and Aickman enthusiast Jeremy Dyson of the British comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen.
For a time, Aickman served as theatre critic for
The Nineteenth Century and After. His reviews remain, to date, uncollected in book form. He also wrote
The Story of Our Inland Waterways (London: Pitman, 1955).
Unpublished fiction and nonfiction
Other than
Go Back At Once, mentioned above, Aickman produced a number of other unpublished works. These include the plays
Allowance For Error,
Duty and
The Golden Round. Another book, a vast philosophical work entitled
Panacea ran to over 1000 pages in manuscript form. Copies of these items are preserved, along with all of Aickman's other remaining papers, in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.