Collected Ghost Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 0199674892
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'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. Darryl Jones's introduction and notes provide a fascinating insight into James's background and his mastery of the genre he made his own.
Palmer himself knocking at the door of the Deanery and being admitted by the butler. A day or so after that, he gathered from a remark his father let fall at breakfast that something a little out of the common was to be done in the Cathedral after morning service on the morrow. ‘And I’d just as soon it was to-day,’ his father added; ‘I don’t see the use of running risks.’ ‘“Father,” I says, “what are you going to do in the Cathedral to-morrow?” And he turned on me as savage as I ever see him—he
she’d have to take the short road through the Wood, and as sure as ever she did, she’d come home in a rare state. I remember her and my father talking about it, and he’d say, “Well, but it can’t do you no harm, Emma,” and she’d say, “Oh! but you haven’t an idear of it, George. Why, it went right through my head,” she says, “and I came over all bewildered-like, and as if I didn’t know where I was. You see, George,” she says, “it ain’t as if you was about there in the dusk. You always goes there in
kind?’ ‘Nothink at all, Master Reginald, only the mark of a hedge and ditch along the middle, much about where the quickset hedge run now; and with all the work they done, if there had been anyone put away there, they was bound to find ’em. But I don’t know whether it done much good, after all. People here don’t seem to like the place no better than they did afore.’ ‘That’s about what I got out of Mitchell,’ said Philipson, ‘and as far as any explanation goes, it leaves us very much where we
bore myself when it became necessary to face my family again. That I was upset by something I had seen must have been pretty clear, but I am very sure that I fought off all attempts to describe it. Why I make a lame effort to do it now I cannot very well explain: it undoubtedly has had some formid—able power of clinging through many years to my imagination. I feel that even now I should be circumspect in passing that Plantation gate; and every now and again the query haunts me: Are there here and
ground, and the victims, bound, crowded into the enclosure. In any case, here must have been an important heathen sanctuary, and a fit place consequently for champions of the new religion to set their standard’ (p. 149). 363 a little ornament like a wheel: the pagan ‘sun wheel’, a symbol of the cycle of the year, and thus of fertility, invoked at the end of the story by the Wise Man of Bascombe: ‘When the sun’s gathering his strength … and when he’s in the height of it, and when he’s beginning
