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Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
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| List Price: | £7.99 |
| Price: | £3.02 |
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Average customer review:
Product Description
This selection of 21 stories represents the best of James's work, and includes three stories which are not in the Collected Edition.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #102274 in Books
- Published on: 1998-10-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
Editorial Reviews
Synopsis
A selection of 21 stories, which also includes three stories that are not in the "Collected Edition".
Customer Reviews
Best read by candlelight.
Read this on a winters night by the fire; don't forget to check the wardrobe before you go to sleep.
A well-edited selection, but why not the Complete Stories?
'Casting the Runes' collects eighteen of the stories whose publication made the reputation of their author as one of the finest of the English supernaturalists. It adds three late stories, 'An Experiment' (1931), 'The Malice of Inanimate Objects' (1933), and 'A Vignette' (1936), which appeared in magazines after the publication of the otherwise definitive 'Collected Ghost Stories' of 1931, and which some readers will judge not to be among the author's best.
The editor of this selection is the author's biographer, and he has revisited the original manuscripts to produce revised versions in the case of about half the stories in the collection. The stories are annotated and difficult terms glossed, and some non-fiction material has been included, in particular the well known piece 'Stories I Have Tried to Write'.
The stories included are of course peerless examples of their kind, and in other circumstances I would be able to recommend this volume without hesitation, but most readers will want to read all of James, and thirty stories are available (as they appeared in the 1931 collection) in other, cheaper editions. Notably, at the time of writing of this review, the Wordsworth edition reprints (for a pound!) the 1931 volume in its entirety, excluding the three uncollected pieces but including the essay mentioned above.
This leaves this Oxford volume to recommend itself on the basis of the editor's valuable contributions and the three uncollected stories, which the reader looking for the best value in James editions may find an inadequate inducement. What a shame that Oxford were not able to produce an annotated Complete Stories to supersede the 1931 reprint.
