Reggie Oliver began writing his well-regarded "strange stories" (a phrase borrowed from Robert Aickman) rather late in life. Oliver was born in 1952 but his first story was not published until 2001. However, he has been active as an actor and a dramatist since the 1970s, and his stories, from the first, are assured, professional, mature works.

This book reprints ten stories drawn from Oliver's first two collections, and a non-supernatural play entitled "Love Unknown, which is about M. R. James - perhaps the greatest ghost-story writer there has ever been.

In fact, just as Aickman was seen as, in some ways, the heir or successor to James, Oliver could be seen as the natural successor to Aickman. He is that good, and there are elements of both the earlier writers' work in his own.

To give one, relatively trivial example, James is noted for being able to pastiche historical documents - from medieval treatises to 17th Century State Trials. Similarly, Oliver here has the necessary scholarship and writing ability to convincingly create, for example, scenes from a Victorian murder trial, the opening of a Restoration comedy, and transcripts from the Inquisition.

A more profound connection is the way Oliver does not explain, or not fully explain, why the strange things he writes about are happening to his protagonists.

In M. R. James, the supernatural is irrational, not because it offends against a scientific worldview, but because, as he was once quoted as saying, "we don't know the rules".

Robert Aickman, a writer of the mid-twentieth century, takes this irrationality even further and his stories often operate on a dream, or rather nightmare, logic where the prosaic everyday world takes a sudden turn into surreal horror with no real clue as to how or why.

Echoes of these two predecessors can be seen in Reggie Oliver's stories: his protagonists are often isolated - children (the narrator recalling an incident from his own childhood), an academic or writer doing research away from home, an actor working in a seaside town among people he's never met before.

The settings of the stories tend to be middle-class, with occasional excursions up or down the social scale, from Eton (Oliver is, in fact, an Old Etonian) to behind the scenes of a Repertory Theatre and Christmas Pantomime. Things start out ordinary, even mundane, and then take that turn into the irrational... ( )