It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Stop What You’re Doing and Read…After Dark: Ghost Stories & Dracula

Stop What You’re Doing and Read…After Dark: Ghost Stories & Dracula

Summary

To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books.

M.R. JAMES' GHOST STORIES
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.

DRACULA
'The door is shut, and the chains rattle; there is a grinding of the key in the lock; I hear the creaking of lock and bolt...I shall not remain alone with them. I may find a way from this dreadful place, away from this cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!'
Young lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania on business for a mysterious Count. Months later in England, beautiful Lucy Westenra falls ill and dies, inexplicably, as if from a severe loss of blood. Lucy's friends, including Jonathan's fiancée Mina and the intrepid doctor Van Helsing, must begin a desperate battle against a powerful, ancient evil, in Bram Stoker's definitive gothic tale.

Reviews

  • M.R. JAMES' GHOST STORIES - 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

About the authors

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.
Learn More

Bram Stoker

Abraham 'Bram' Stoker (1847 - 1912) was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and joined the Irish Civil Service before his love of theatre led him to become the unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Mail. He went on to act as as manager and secretary for the actor Sir Henry Irving, while writing his novels, the most famous of which is Dracula.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more