Although Robert Aickman's reputation during his lifetime was small, he is posthumously gaining critical approval as a contemporary master of the English ghost story. He is widely recognized as "the last great master" of the English ghost story, which stems from the groundbreaking fiction of J. Sheridan Le Fanu in the nineteenth century and was carried on by Arthur Machen, M. R. James, and Algernon Blackwood into the twentieth.

The son of William Arthur and Mabel Violet Aickman, Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in London on 27 June 1914. The family later moved to Stanmore, outside London, where they lived in his father's home at Langton Lodge. William Aickman was fifty-three when he married Robert's mother, who was twenty-three. As Aickman later wrote in his autobiography The Attempted Rescue (1966), "My father, as I knew him, was impossible to live with, to be married to, to be dependent upon." There were...