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Ghost Stories
M. R. James, Ruth Rendell (Introducer)

Ghost Stories

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Summary


Malignant forces and supernatural visitors haunt this selection of 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 modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls 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.

Reviews

  • In M.R. James' stories, the ordinary tips over into an alternative existence that is just as believable
    Guardian

About the author

M. R. James

M. R. James, the bookish and precocious son of a curate, was born in Kent in 1862. He studied at Cambridge and remained there for most of his life, becoming Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Provost of King's College and later Vice-Chancellor of the university. A brilliant scholar, he translated the New Testament apocrypha and catalogued many of the university's medieval manuscripts. His first story collection, based on stories he read aloud to friends on Christmas Eve, was published in 1904 as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and was followed by three more. He died in 1936.
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