Description
Book SynopsisMalignant forces and supernatural visitors hauntthese superbly spooky tales, selected and introduced by Ruth Rendell
M. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernize a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognizable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a doll''s house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window?ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense. James''s prescription for his ghost stories was to let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.
Trade ReviewIn M.R. James' stories, the ordinary tips over into an alternative existence that is just as believable * Guardian *
An original and powerful storyteller.... A gnawing sense of unease, a steady accumulation of sounds, shadows and images finally meet in a single moment of sensational physical horror * Daily Telegraph *
M R James, who ushered the ghost story into our century, is still quite simply the craftiest * Independent *
M R James is quite simply the finest writer of ghost stories ever. They're always set in an academic context, about university chaps who find out very nasty things while they're researching. They uncork the wrong bottle, unearth the wrong papers, dig up the wrong place. . . James was provost of Eton and a fellow of Kings College, and the stories have this wonderful candlelit, academic atmosphere, surrounded by incredible nastiness. Tweedy, but unpleasant -- Christopher Frayling
A master class in creepiness from the Edwardian-era Provost of King's College, Cambridge. James delivers brilliant atmospherics, gnawing disquiet and (above all) horrific denouements created by suggestion rather than ghoulish spectacle * Independent *
