“Weird fiction,” a term popularized by H. P. Lovecraft, became a self-serious genre during the twentieth century and the first years of this one.* In the hands of Samuel R. Delany, China Miéville, and Octavia Butler, it has taken on Borgesian solemnity, straying from Lovecraft’s haunting but minimal formulation: a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present.” But two recently released books—one old, one new—show us that those “unknown forces” do not have to remake the entire world in order to be weird. Our littles lives are strange enough.

The stories in Robert Aickman’s Compulsory Games, reissued this month by New York Review Books Classics, plumb the darkness curtained off by our normal, boring lives, as well as the inanity of those lives themselves. Aickman died in 1981. In life he was perhaps known best for co-founding a canal advocacy group called the Inland Waterways Association. (For more, see his 1955 nonfiction book, Know Your Waterways.) His grandfather Richard Marsh gained some literary notice for his 1897 bonechiller, The Beetle, which initially outsold Bram Stroker’s Dracula. In his off hours Aickman wrote luminously weird short stories. In each, some ordinary postwar British person—a chartered accountant, a banker, a civil servant, a member of the local committee for overseeing public space—is drawn quite unknowing into a netherworld.

COMPULSORY GAMES by Robert Aickman New York Review Books Classics, 368 pp., $17.95

In the story “Hands in Glove,” Winifred and Millicent take a trip to soothe the latter’s broken heart. They choose a picnic spot of “sedgy and umbrous” beauty. But what are these mushrooms that have sprung up where no mushrooms earlier were? Why do the cows in that field look so much as if they aren’t there at all? The practical, map-toting women are left on less solid ground, with hideous results. In the story “Marriage,” its hapless narrator Laming is glared at by laborers in the park who see him go on assignations with a certain Ellen when he is supposed to be dating her flatmate, Helen. “The railwaymen glowered motionlessly, awaiting strong tea, awaiting death, seeing death before them, not interfering.” When Laming later catches sight of Helen walking down the street, she is “carrying something weighty, this time slung over her left shoulder, which gave her an utterly absurd resemblance to the cod-carrying fisherman in the Scott’s Emulsion advertisement.” She looks absurd but that burden is coming, inexorably, menacingly, for Laming. He knows that advertisement all too well; “standing, as it did, for mens sana in corpore sano.”

That maxim—a sound mind in a sound body—is the sort of bourgeois faux-wisdom that fails to equip Aickman’s civil servants to deal with the supernatural. He ropes English fairy story into the mix, a rural chill reminiscent of The Wicker Man. But each protagonist fails to meet the spiritual demands of those myths. Faced with a brand new river at the end of his garden in the story “No Time is Passing,” a man named Delbert looks around him befuddled, but unfazed. “There was much mud, and not a seabird to scratch at it anywhere. Delbert, a male, was already becoming preoccupied with the working, practical details.” But those details will not protect Delbert from the prestidigitator living on the other side of that freaky river, a man who produces fruits from the thin air and then eats them whole—even, horrifyingly, a pineapple.

Belly Up, a debut story collection from Rita Bullwinkel, runs on a similar kind of shuddering mirth. Like Aickman, Bullwinkel writes very intimate and small lives filled with the details that make daily existence absurd, which are then shot through with thought experiment. “By the time my daughter came of age,” the story “Hunker Down” opens, “the economy was so bad that it was cheaper to hire someone to hold her breasts up than it was to buy her a bra.” The parents post a Craigslist ad for a breast-holder, and Mark fits the bill. Once Mark’s hands are gnarled beyond repair, the parents replaced Mark with Evan, with the first employee training the new one. “The two of them, Evan and Mark, could be seen before dawn in dutiful practice—hunching over in the dark, cupping air and pacing the length of our lawn.”