tl;dr: My Secret Santa got me the perfect gift. I mean really. You don't understand how happy I am.

Way back in November when I filled out the "wants" section of my redditgifts profile I mentioned that I like books a lot, mostly poetry, fiction, anything by Jung, and as a bit of a joke I said that Robert Aickman is my favorite author. I mean, he really is my favorite author, that's not why it was a joke rather it's a joke because editions of his books can be a little hard to find and a little bit pricey:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=robert+aickman+the+late+breakfasters&x=0&y=0

Of course, not all his books are so expensive, one can find an incomplete edition of some of his short stories here and there for approximately ten dollars -- and I make a point of buying those when I come across them in a used book store, but once you get down to either of his two novels, his autobiographical writing, or some of his rarer collections, then things get quite a bit tricker.

Okay, I know this is wordy already, and you're wondering who Robert Aickman is and why you should care. Here's something Neil Fucking Gaiman has to say about him:

'I think that Aickman is one of those authors that you respond to on a very primal level. If you're a writer, it's a bit like being a stage magician. A stage magician produces coin, takes coin, demonstrates coin vanished... That tends to be what you do as a fiction writer, reading fiction. You'll go, "Oh look. He's setting that up."...Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished, but I don't know if he was holding a key in the hand to begin with. I find myself admiring everything he does from an auctorial standpoint. And I love it as a reader. He will bring on atmosphere. He will construct these perfect, dark, doomed little stories, what he called "strange stories".'

Magician is the right word. Aickman's stories have a profoundly magical effect on me and like one might dream of coming across that nice edition of Nabokov's Mary, I dream about finding Aickman volumes every damn time I'm in a used book store and I have only once found one of his more common collections. That's it. Of course I've acquired more than that from the internet but one thing I did not have is either of his novels.

Well, December 31 I got home to find a brown padded envelope in the mail. I thought it might be from my santa, who told me it would likely be late. I was just pleasantly curious as to what he might have sent me. When I opened the envelope, and then the inner wrapping my jaw literally dropped. You know what they say, "he who can say how he burns, burns little." I was just silent.

I am now the proud owner of "The Model", Robert Aickman's posthumously published second novel. I've been reading it and I must say it is everything I could hope for. I'm still shocked to have received such an amazing gift.

I seriously doubt most people will have read this far, but I hope someone does so that I'm not the only person who knows how goddamn cool my secret santa, wccarter, is. If you've ever received that perfect gift (from a stranger, no less) and know how excited I am, please give this guy the accolades he deserves for being awesome.

Thank you! You've really made my Christmas.