‘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.
Now We’re Shut in for the Night
I must have been about 12 when I first opened James’s Collected Ghost Stories and turned to ‘A School Story’. As a boy who enjoyed gruesome yarns and, more surprisingly, Latin grammar, I was...
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