The Wine-Dark Sea

The Wine-Dark Sea is a book of short stories by Robert Aickman. The Younger Son suggested this and loaned me his prized copy. I will be on the look-out for more by this author. The stories have stayed with me. I keep finding my mind turning back to certain images from the stories and returning to feelings I experienced while reading them. This isn't "horror" as I usually think of the word. Disquieting, though.

from the back of the book:

Robert Aickman's strange stories - his preferred term for them - are the subtle and leisurely explorations of psychological displacement and paranoia. Having none of the shock effects and conventional imagery of horror, they are meticulous, quiet, and thoroughly disturbing. His characters are ordinary but gradually touched with dread until they are drawn into the deeper, darker and infinitely more dismaying world of the terrors within.

Whether you enter The Inner Room, a doll's house with a secret, The Wine-Dark Sea, where a man's thoughts are trapped in Hellenic Greece, or Into the Wood, a sanatorium for the sleepless, you do so at your peril. Robert Aickman will bring you mounting panic and lasting disquiet.

Winner of the World fantasy Award, Robert Aickman has an exalted reputation among the most widely published writers of the genre. In the classic mould of Henry and M R James, his is perhaps the most important body of work since Edgar Allan Poe.