Chhota Pegs

I am a big fan of creepy stories. No, I’m not into Stephen King or Dean Koontz or their choleric forerunners: Lovecraft and (alas often) Poe among them. I will take M.R. James though, even though he sits uneasily on the fence between baroque excess and darker understatement. But how not to love “ Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad ”? I’ll take Stoker too (yes, yes, Dracula , but read The Squaw ). Among my all-time favorites, however, are the more nuanced but nevertheless not unusual suspects; say Ambrose Bierce’s " The Boarded Window ," W.W. Jacobs’s " The Monkey’s Paw ," H.H. Munro’s " Shredni Vashtar ," or that great eerie masterpiece by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw . I’ll also take The Little Stranger , a chilling novel by Sarah Waters. So it was with interest that I recently picked up a reissue of Robert Aickman’s oddly described “strange stories,” this one a collection called Cold Hand in Mine . I liked the description “strange stories.”...