Product Description

M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror. As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James, Stories I Have Tried To Write , which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are 'Casting the Runes', 'Oh, Whistle and I ll come to you, My Lad', 'The Tractate Middoth , The Ash Tree' and 'Canon Alberic s Scrapbook'. "There are some authors one wishes one had never read in order to have the joy of reading them for the first time. For me, M.R. James is one of these". Ruth Rendall

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5073 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Customer Reviews

Leave your preconceptions at the door
Mr James was born in 1862. He was the son of a clergyman. He became a biblical scholar and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. So you might expect from his life and his writing style that his stories are sedate things that the Victorian reader could read without too much upset. They would be free of troubling undertones, macabre inages, they would be comforting.

You'd be dreadfully wrong. The first story in this collection is Lost Hearts, a brutal and twisted story of scholarly detatchment, unethical experiments and gory murder. Going through the book we discover other classics showing just how physically and mentally violent James' imagination could be. There's the desperate attempt to shake the curse in Casting the Runes, the deadening claustrophobia of The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, and the final story, Wailing Well, stuns the reader by beginning as a comedy and ending so blackly that few Hollywood horror films, shall we say, would dare to film it as written.

This is not sedate. It has an undeniable power that lingers after the book has been shut. I would actually put it above Lovecraft. There are weak points, it must be said; several times stories don't seem to get going before they end, creating a sense of anticlimax. But this does not detract from the achievements made in the other stories, and it's not going to stop me giving the collection five stars.

An infernal collection
It's surprising how many of these 30 short stories of ghosts, demons and other infernal trouble-makers seem familiar. I recognised over a dozen of them. "Casting the Runes" was the biggest surprise. It's just 18 pages long and easily recognisable as the original story that one of my favourite films from childhood (which I've been trying to get hold of on DVD for ages - my old video copy of it having worn out) is based upon. The film is called "Night of the Demon" (1957). Several of these stories have been read on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Digital Radio 7 recently and others have been made into films for television. The film of "A View from a Hill" (a mere 7 pages long in this book) was shown on one of the BBC channels only a week or so ago. The films are all excellent, but they can't improve on James's writing. It's hard to put a finger on what is so terrifying about his spooks. Some of them crawl. Anyone opening a door or turning on a light and seeing some strange, cadaverous looking thing crawling down a corridor towards them should certainly scream or faint. Some are hairy with long finger nails. After living through the hairy 60s and 70s, hair holds no fear for me - but those finger nails are a different matter. Some are more along the lines of animated skeletons held together by scraps of mouldering flesh and others are toad-like. I wonder James didn't give himself nightmares -- perhaps he did. You really need to give your imagination free-rein to properly experience the delightful tingle of fear M R James was hoping to generate for his audience. These tales are almost entirely goreless. Readers who prefer the blood and guts sort of horror probably won't enjoy this book. There are no rabid psychos leaping about with veins and gizzards dripping from their teeth. This collection is far more subtle and interesting than that.

Spooky Stuff
Having seen the short season of MR James classics on television at Christmas, I decided to keep the tradition of ghostly readings on Christmas Eve, I decided to buy this book and was not dissapointed,scared more likely.
It has to be said that out of the 30 or stories that are included, I was left a trifle dissapointed with perhaps about ten, but overall the content of the other stories were chilling and disturbing.
Reading these short tales whilst alone with just the sound of a ticking clock really takes you back to the time when most of the stories are told (1850's). Three stand out tales are 'Two Hearts,Whistle and I'll come to you and the atmospheric A Warning to the curious' are not for the faint hearted. In summary, I would decribe most of these stories as 'chilling classics from a bygone age' Enjoy