A fine collection of gripping, gory and chilling stories many of which lay the foundation for several modern day films. If you want a good spook then here is some good bed time reading, although maybe sleep with the light on!
June 2010 Guest Editor Patrick Gale on M. R. James...
James didn’t invent the ghost story but he certainly perfected it. With their dry tone and fussily academic narrators, his tales of ghosts and demons in everything from a hotel room to a picture and even a whistle build a convincing sense of evil from what is left unsaid or unexplained. If the mutilated ghost children in Lost Hearts don’t lead to you drawing your curtains more firmly, you have no imagination…
'I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...'
Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries provide settings for unbearable menace, from creatures seeking retribution and harm. These stories have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb.
This edition presents all of James's published ghost stories, including the unforgettable 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad' and 'Casting the Runes', and an appendix of James's writings on the ghost story. Darryl Jones's introduction and notes provide a fascinating insight into James's background and his mastery of the genre he made his own.
