Continuing in  the laudable task of reprinting all  the short story collections by Robert Aickman, the people at Tartarus Press now provide us  with  a new, gorgeous hardcover edition of Powers of Darkness a book originally published in 1966.

For those not familiar with Aickman’s “strange stories” the collection is not perhaps the best introduction to the work of this unusual author, whose specialty was to pen dark, subtle, enigmatic fiction open to different interpretations by the reader. For  any confirmed Aickman’s fan, however, the volume is a further step into the world of a beloved writer whose work is so fascinating that to miss even one of his stories would be an unforgivable mistake.

Powers of Darkness includes three of Aickman’s most famous tales.

“Your Tiny Hand is Frozen” is an offbeat ghost story where the telephone becomes the vehicle of love and horror, an instrument of torture and pleasure to a man dying of loneliness.

The lyric and subtly erotic “The Wine-Dark Sea” is a piece imbued with the power of Greek mythology, set on a mysterious island inhabited by three sinister sorceresses.

In the ambiguous “The Visiting Star” a famous actress, come to play in a small town theatre, brings with her more than she was supposed to.

The other stories included in this collection, while confirming the author’s uncanny ability to wrap in an elegant but straightforward prose ambiguous, unsettling material, seem to me comparatively  “minor” products (absit injuria verbis).

“A Roman Question” is a complex tale where a married couple attending a rather inane conference gets involved in the attempt to summon a missing (dead?) person. Enjoyable as it may be  the piece remains somehow a unaccomplished and not quite convincing. The same applies to “Larger Than Oneself”, revolving around a crazy gathering of spiritualists.

“My Poor Friend” remains half way between Aickman’s more successful tales and the less satisfactory ones. A cruel story blending the prosaic world of Parliament (with its conventions and complicated rules) and the supernatural, which, with its basically evil nature, jeopardises the safety of our daily existence. The two aspects of the narrative merge nicely in the middle of the tale, but the beginning of the story, dealing with the absurdity of politics,  develops so slowly that a touch of  tedium sneaks in.

And if you think I’m committing sacrilege, please remember that a reviewer’s task  may also include nit-picking.

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