Available Now

Valancourt Books, a US publishing house which specialises in reprints of underappreciated genre works, has published a book with an introductory essay by me, together with a handful of minor contributions by one Robert Aickman. The Late Breakfasters, Aickman's only published full-length novel, which has been virtually unobtainable for many years (except for a recent, disgracefully slovenly Faber Finds edition), appears alongside half a dozen stories, some of which receive their American début in this volume. Though not exactly a ghost story, The Late Breakfasters also manages to be not exactly a Bildungsroman, a love story, a satire on modernisation or a tragicomic society novel, and displays to the full Aickman's accustomed quirkiness of plot and elegance of style. The stories - four quite early, two very late - range from a nearly (but not very nearly) conventional tale of a séance and what it called forth, to an encounter with a Faustian artist, to a perversely erotic variation on the myth of Sweeney Todd which I believe constituted my own first experience of Aickman, via Kirby McCauley's great 1980 anthology Dark Forces.

I should get hold of this, if I were you. Readers in the US and Canada can order direct from the publisher; the book is available in Britain from Amazon UK.