Collected Ghost Stories (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

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Stephen King once wrote that James' ghosts were harmless; I wonder if he'd forgotten "A Warning to the Curious", which concerns a guardian of sorts who is not to be trifled with. An exception is the inquisitive Mr Wraxhall, whose innocent rummaging through the archives of the noble de la Gardie family takes a sinister turn. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. Not only does he star this festive season as Jacob Marley in his own theatrical retelling of A Christmas Carol, he also serves up the latest of his classic M.

Count Magnus follows the success of James adaptations The Mezzotint (2021), Martin’s Close (2019) and Tractate Middoth in 2013, and original scripts The Dead Room (2018) and The Crooked House in 2008. David Langford has described James as the author of "the 20th century's most influential canon of ghost stories". The only evidence of her witchcraft are eyewitness accounts by Sir Matthew Fell, the owner of a local seat named Castringham. The stories that particularly stood for me were, "The Mezzotint", "Oh, Whistle, and I Will Come to You, My Lad", "The Haunted Dolls' House", "The Uncommon Prayer-Book", "A View From a Hill", Wailing Well", and "Casting The Runes". With its modern setting, this is not generally included under the heading of A Ghost Story for Christmas [52] and was originally intended as an episode of the anthology Dead of Night.

Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view, I am sure it is a sound one. James’s ghost stories are a good example of how genuine fear in the reader is built up through a gradual accumulation of details: suggestion, as much as the big reveal. An injured RAF Flight Lieutenant suffers from repeated horrific nightmares while recuperating at a remote mansion in Wales. R. James during the Christmas of 1898 as a young boy, who proceeds to tell him the story of The Rose Garden. Clark's final Ghost Story for Christmas, Stigma, was an original story by Clive Exton filmed around the stone circles at Avebury, Wiltshire.

James is considered the master of the Victorian ghost story and this collection contains most of his short stories.By October 1915, when he resigned from the post, he knew that “more than four hundred and fifty Cambridge men have fallen: a hundred and fifty of them, at least, should have been undergraduates still”. Often the protagonist is a scholarly enquirer who stumbles upon unwelcome and potentially dangerous knowledge in the course of his enquiries, and his journey, along with the story, slowly descend into a madness equalling that of Lovecraft, but in a gentlemanly, English way. Because his protagonists and plots tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests, he is known as the originator of the "antiquarian ghost story".

James greatly admired the work of both Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter Scott, and along with the horror his stories contain a strong element of the weird, in its original sense of uncanny. And not all people who suffer consequences are adults (some are boys, like a rich boy in "The Residence At Whitminster", or a boy scout in "Wailing Well"). An investigation of the tree reveals a cave beneath it with a cavernous spider's nest and the withered skeleton of a woman (presumably the remains of Mrs. During the ninth series broadcast in 2021, which underwent a format change due to the coronavirus pandemic, Oswald 'Uncle Newt' Nightingale, analogous with Finnemore's storyteller character, meets M.He dressed and looked like an old Sea Salt, and in his gruff voice would tell us stories by firelight in the boys' room of an evening with all the lights out and his back to the fire. it achieves comparably skilful effects through visual language and sound, heightening theme and supernatural mood. All the stories later appeared in Hodgson's collection The Fellow Travellers and Other Ghost Stories ( Ash-Tree Press, 1998).