M. R. James
The most imitated ghost stories in the language, and he wrote them to read aloud at Christmas.Montague Rhodes James was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and later of Eton. He catalogued the medieval manuscripts of half the great libraries in England, work still consulted a century later. Ghost stories were a hobby, written to read to friends in his rooms by candlelight. Almost nobody reads his catalogues now.Before James the English ghost story was Gothic: castles, ruins, a picturesque past, a heroine. He threw all of it out. His formula was an ordinary modern setting and an ordinary modern man, and then something very old that gets at him. The thing that comes is rarely a transparent lady. It is physical, it is often hairy or damp, and it is frequently met by touch before it is seen.Every story here turns on a document. A scrapbook, a mezzotint, an inscription, a ballad, a manuscript, a letter, a plan of a maze. The scholar finds it, reads it correctly, and by reading it correctly puts himself in danger. Nobody in James is destroyed by ignorance. They are destroyed by scholarship.Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) was his first book and it arrived complete. All eight stories, in the order he chose:Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book (1895)Lost Hearts (1895)The Mezzotint (1904)The Ash-tree (1904)Number 13 (1899)Count Magnus (1904)Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904)The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1904)This annotated edition adds:An original introduction on what James invented, and why his imitators find it hardest to copy the moment before the apparitionA headnote before every storyA glossary of James’s world, with his invented learned citations flagged as inventedHis own prefatory note from the first edition, printed exactly as he wrote itH. P. Lovecraft on M. R. James, at length, from Supernatural Horror in LiteratureQuis est iste qui uenit. Who is this who is coming?
