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.
Montague Rhodes James
Montague Rhodes James OM FBA (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936) was an English author, medievalist scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–1918), and of Eton College (1918–1936). He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge (1913–1915).
James's work as a medievalist and scholar is still highly regarded,[1] but he is best remembered for his ghost stories, which some consider among the best in the genre. He redefined the ghost story for the new century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. Because his protagonists and plots tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests, he is known as the originator of the "antiquarian ghost story".
