Cold Hand in Mine

Robert Aikman is a legend of English horror: a writer and editor whose “strange stories” (as he called them himself) influenced a whole galaxy of horror and fantasy writers—from Neil Gaiman to Peter Straub, from Ramsey Campbell to Adam Nevill and John Langan. His elegantly written, carefully crafted tales don’t shock and scare with standard fears or blood, but with a radical shift in the laws of nature and everyday life.

“Cold Hands in My Hand” is one of Aikman’s most famous books. Here, a young man at a fair encounters the most unpleasant—and at the same time enticing—attraction of his life; a young Englishwoman meets in Italy something that will completely change her, if it doesn’t kill her; and a simple traveling salesman finds shelter in a hotel that seems ordinary at first glance, but turns out to be sinister and incomprehensible—a place more like a labyrinth, where terrible heat reigns and there’s no way out.

The strange territory created by Robert Aikman—“the abyss beneath the face of order”—still stirs the imagination of writers and readers around the world, and the unusual composition of the stories and the special atmosphere of his work still have no equal. For the first time in Russian.