Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32381 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
The tail piece "Stories I have tried to write " accompanies 30 classic tales of their genre set against convincing backgrounds to afflict chilling terror on the reader.

Customer Reviews

classic Victorian ghost stories, but no surprises
A collection of short stories, that can be dipped in and out of. None are particularly long, so there is no need to put aside long periods to really get into it. The stories all seemed a little bit quaint to me, and not that dissimilar. The main characters tend to be middle-aged/aging bachelors, either academics or clergymen, which would be fairly unusual in modern fiction. I cannot say I found any of them particularly chilling, but I enjoyed reading them nonetheless.

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.

An Invitation to the Curious...
Ruth Rendell once remarked that she wished she had never read M.R. James so that she might have the pleasure of reading him for the first time, and I for one understand exactly what she meant. If you have not yet come across his work either in a complete edition or in anthologies then indeed a treat awaits you. The secret of James success lies not in the portrayal of apparitions but in the consequences of an invasion of the supernatural into the cosy, cloistered academic worlds of his dons and squires who exist very happily in their erudite comfort until that moment when their neat assumptions about the world are shattered by the appearance of the irrational. Although James can create monsters as shocking as anyone, they are always implicit rather than explicit, glimpsed for a fleeting moment as much in the brain as in the eye, the consequences of their presence far more powerful than the manifestation itself. The effect of two different dimensions colliding is all the more powerful here for James was steeped in the ideas and traditions of a nineteenth century scholar's world, and spent his whole life in the kind of parsonages, churches and collegiate institutions that provide the atmospheric setting for so many of these stories. Then there is the writer's flair for evoking character in a few short lines and the humour which emerges from a pen that might seem altogether too weighty to indulge in such levity. Everyone has their own favourite M.R James stories: for excitement my pick would be Casting the Runes, others argue the merits of A Warning to the Curious or Lost Hearts but then again I have a soft spot for An Episode of Cathedral History, as it is the epitome of the virtues listed above. Television has made a number of creditable attempts to adapt these stories but nothing beats the original texts. A pleasure not to be missed.