"The Unsettled Dust" by Robert Aickman

Year of Publication:  1990

Length:  362 pages

Genre:  Horror, fantasy, short stories

During his lifetime English author Robert Aickman was probably best known as a conservationist, helping to set up the Inland Waterways Association to preserve canals in Britain, but after his death in 1981 at the age of 66, his reputation has grown as an author of unique skill.  The Unsettled Dust, which was published posthumously, contains eight of his forty eight horror stories (or "strange stories" as Aickman preferred to term them).  

In "The Unsettled Dust" a visitor to an old dust-shrouded English country house, finds something there even more sinister than the two creepy sisters who live there; in "The Houses of the Russians" a man recounts how he found a magical talisman on a forbidden island in Finland; in "No Stronger than a Flower" an unhappy woman undergoes bizarre changes after a visit to a sinister beautician; in "The Cicerones" a tourist comes to regret his visit to a remote Belgian church; in "The Next Glade" a woman is haunted by a strange man she meets at a party; in "Ravissante" a young artist has a disturbing experience when he visits the elderly widow of a famous painter; in "Bind Your Hair" a woman meets some strange new friends when she visits her boyfriend's family in their remote country village; and in "The Stains" a bereaved man falls in love with a strange young woman, and loses far more than his heart.

Robert Aickman wrote beautiful prose.  His stories are well crafted, with psychologically complex characters in a carefully described, mundane world, that become increasingly strange and disturbing, until the characters are trapped with no way out.  Even at the end of the stories, it's unclear whether it is really the end.  Often the darker elements in the stories are hinted at and are more ambiguous than explicit, and very little is actually explained.  The stories have a genuinely disquieting feel to them, and some of them are really genuinely scary.  Recommended for fans of intelligent supernatural horror.