Depending on where your interests lie, Robert Aickman (1914–81) is notable either as co-founder and champion of the Inland Waterways Association, a group which at their inaugural meeting in 1946 made it their mission to restore and preserve Britain’s canal system from neglect and destruction, or as a writer of odd and unsettling ghost stories – forty-eight of them, published between 1951 and 1985, in eight books. (There is also a volume of autobiography, The Attempted Rescue, from 1966.) Aickman was passionate about both endeavours, but you get a sense that he would have liked to have been remembered for the writing of his eerie tales about churchyard picnics, thwarted love, empty relationships, and stultifying routines. And, mostly, he has been. He was very proud in 1975 to have been awarded the World Fantasy Award for “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal”, a phlegmatic account of the corruption of an innocent abroad, and is often cited as one of the unsung greats of horror and fantasy by successful exponents of the genre. But despite these significant accolades, his fictions are often difficult to grasp and not obviously “ghost stories” at all.

It is certainly one of the recurring criticisms of Aickman, even after a Faber reissue in 2014 to mark his centenary, that his “strange stories”, as he liked to call them, remain too vague, too bloodless and wryly devoid of easy answers, to reach a large audience. An “Aickmanesque” story envelops the reader like a mist, leaving uncertain clues and contradictory rationales. Aickman knew it himself. “It is a queer story”, he wrote of one (without revealing its title). “Not likely to be understood at all.” This is a sentiment he repeats time and again throughout a new selection of his letters to Kirby McCauley, his literary agent in the US.

Ostensibly, Aickman knows he is a particular flavour. His only hope, he says in 1977, “lies in my work reaching the occasional enthusiast who is strongly enough placed to do something about it”. But, lest this should be regarded as self-deprecation, elsewhere the same year he recounts how his publishers “get out one sentence to promote each book” and in his case, for the latest compilation, they have gone for “We think they are better than Roald Dahl”, to which Aickman replies: “I should hope so”.

This selection of letters provides a fascinating insight into a complicated…