I didn't have the pleasure of being creeped out by these tales as a child, but reading 'The Mezzotint' with my ears on one of my Edinburgh walkabouts is one of the few times I've recaptured that innocent chill in adulthood. Probably because it reminded me of that scary bit at the start of The Witches where a child gets trapped in a painting. At least I wasn't deprived of Roald Dahl.
Even if none of the others succeed in raising a goosebump or ruffling a feather, reading The Top 40 M. R. James Stories is still going to be a falsely nostalgic pleasure. Pass the imaginary Christmas cake. I miss British desserts. I don't belong in this time or place.
Tradition-satisfying key:
Collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Collected in More Ghost Stories
Collected in A Thin Ghost and Others
Collected in A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories
Later stories
Unpublished drafts
40. After Dark in the Playing Fields (1924)
This encounter with a talking owl isn't your typical M. R. James story, so it's no surprise he left it out of his final collection. I wouldn't mind if the owl had anything of interest to impart. It doesn't even talk like an owl would.
39. The Game of Bear (Unfinished)
There isn't enough here to get an idea of what the "Purdue business" entailed or where the story might have been going, but that fellow seems rather shaken about it all the same.
38. Merfield House (Unfinished)
I like a good ambiguous ending, but James' abandoned draft didn't leave me speculating about what might have happened next. It seems the author was as uninspired by the "scientific experiment" set-up as I was.
37. There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard (1924)
Shakespeare never got around to telling the tale of sprites and goblins began in The Winter's Tale. It was arguably more intriguing to leave it hanging on that opening phrase, but cocky M. R. James feels he's up to the task, and extrapolates non-canonically like he's writing for Wookieepedia. The exercise wasn't worth it.
36. A Night in King's College Chapel (1892?)
It's speculated that James wrote this when he was a student at the college. Combined with the fact that he kept it to himself and presumably didn't think it was much good, I'm much more forgiving about his story of stained-glass Bible characters coming to life after dark than I would be if he'd dared to actually publish it in a book.
The tone goes for humour rather than horror or awe, and if you find it all a bit hard to swallow, I guess you missed the part at the beginning where he fell asleep.
35. Martin's Close (1911)
James' stories may be a bit stuffy and old-fashioned, but I didn't often find them boring. This was one of the exceptions. It's nearly all written as the faux-verbatim account of a 17th-century murder trial, pointless digressions and all, which would be starkly realistic if he'd bothered to adapt his writing to the period style. There is a ghost, but that's boring too.
34. Marcilly-le-Hayer (before 1929)
By James' own admission in 'Stories I Have Tried to Write,' this was a failed and abandoned story that we have no business reading, but I can't resist the curios.
There's the germ of a great idea in an unassuming novel suddenly becoming uncannily prescient, seemingly commenting on things you're experiencing and making predictions for the future. Sadly, James couldn't think of a way to put it to good use beyond merely impressing his narrator with the coincidence.
33. John Humphreys (Unfinished)
This early, abandoned (or partly misplaced), greatly inferior draft of the similarly-named tale from More Ghost Stories takes young Mr. Humphreys down a more malicious supernatural path that seems to have it in for him. It's nothing the insufferable toff doesn't deserve.
32. A School Story (1906)
James' introduction says he came up with this one to creep out a school choir, and it's a bit shorter and rougher as a result. Whether it truly is the first ever school-based ghost story or not, I could do without the author boasting of this presumed accomplishment via his narrator a couple of times. The sketches of typical schoolboy tall tales that are lightly mocked at the start are more entertaining than the proper story.
31. The Uncommon Prayer-Book (1921)
MRJ wasn't the most prolific writer, and considering how repetitive the stories are getting by his final collection, maybe that's not such a tragedy after all. You'll get the most out of this one if you share the author's interest in vintage prayer books and his distrust of foreigners.
30. An Evening's Entertainment (1925)
The author's holy, bigoted personality shines through in this bit of filler from his final collection, which condemns sinful pagans mucking about with things they ought not to and probably sodomising each other while they're at it.
It's not like I'm offended when long-dead authors have appropriately old-fashioned views, but I don't particularly enjoy reading them either. Thankfully, we'd eventually get The Wicker Man and its ilk warning the interfering Christians to back off unless they wanted to be the ones on the bonfire.
29. Two Doctors (1919)30. An Evening's Entertainment (1925)
The author's holy, bigoted personality shines through in this bit of filler from his final collection, which condemns sinful pagans mucking about with things they ought not to and probably sodomising each other while they're at it.
It's not like I'm offended when long-dead authors have appropriately old-fashioned views, but I don't particularly enjoy reading them either. Thankfully, we'd eventually get The Wicker Man and its ilk warning the interfering Christians to back off unless they wanted to be the ones on the bonfire.
Another story that seems to exist just to fill out a collection, this is short enough to be inoffensive, even if its tale of a wicked doctor taking out his rival with weird dreams and an enchanted, self-suffocating pillow (or something) is a bit silly.
He may fancy himself a Count Magnus, but the jealous and vindictive Dr. Quinn is firmly in the Karswell mould of James' pettiest corporeal villains.
28. A Warning to the Curious (1925)
James invents some convincing East Anglian folklore that's more interesting than the standard haunting shenanigans that ensue. It's a cautionary fable for adults about the importance of not bothering to investigate areas that ridiculous superstition suggests you don't, so I wasn't especially taken with its message.
Even aside from that, it's quite boring.
Even aside from that, it's quite boring.
27. Rats (1929)
Not a story of rats at all, it turns out. Rather, it builds to the most pointless ghost in literature, which is casually explained with none of the enthusiasm you'd expect for such a revelation. It gets points for its pleasant fishing town setting, at least.
26. The Malice of Inanimate Objects (1933)
There's no hard evidence that this avenging Toy Story-style plot actually took place. We're supposed to accept it, like all the other stories, but I like to image it's all a paranoid conspiracy theory on the part of our clearly guilt-raddled victim. He probably arranged that cryptic blood message himself.
This was one of James' final stories, and its mentions of aeroplanes and motorbikes are jarring if you've failed to adequately progress your mental images along the way. People were hardly wearing top hats any more.
25. The Rose Garden (1911)
Another tale of evil deeds imprinting bad juju on the landscape, a home improvement project leads to some posh people being troubled by bad dreams. I liked the shared dream/vision aspect, but was less fond of the very convenient correspondence dropping exposition into our laps at the end.
24. The Tractate Middoth (1911)
A ghost story partly set in a library, with catalogue numbers and everything, is bound to be appreciated by bookworms. But after that opening, I found this slow-going and lacking in peril. I'm never fond of stories that hinge on someone claiming an inheritance over someone else. Earn your own fortunes, you freeloaders.
23. The Residence at Whitminster (1919)
The familiar titles and BBC adaptations start to dry up with James' latter two collections, and I'm starting to get a bit bored of the same old settings and themes. This is another tale of ungodly evil intruding on a pastoral parish, but this time the evildoers are not wizened alchemists, they're very naughty boys.
James' descriptions of the infernal rites are as tame as you'd expect from the publishing standards of the time and his Christian imagination, and the story feels more cautionary than usual since kids are involved. It's for the best that he didn't live to see heavy metal.
22. Wailing Well (1927)
James wrote this story specifically to read around a campfire to scouts. That's enough to make you warm to it in advance, and being under pressure to keep his young audience rapt means it ends up being more action-packed and less introspective, which is a nice change of pace.
It doesn't matter that it's populated with one-dimensional stock characters, nor that James nicked the crawling ghost from one of his own stories. This is a story that would still entertain kids today, unless I'm really out of touch.
21. Speaker Lenthall's Tomb (Unfinished)
This draft has as much in common with 'An Episode of Cathedral History' as the 'John Humphreys' draft does with its namesake tale, but if that was a revision, it lost the emphasis on character. It probably wouldn't have been among the classics, but when you've read all the others, it's a serviceable story of an affronted ghost delivering post-mortem vigilante justice.
20. Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book (1895)
It annoys me when people reference things the wrong way round, but James' first spooky story is reminiscent of Lovecraft's most jittery tales, particularly 'Pickman's Model' which also features an artist's rendering that people can't bear to look at. James spares us the psychological torment by only cautiously describing the drawing. I think I could handle it.
Then, just when timid readers think they're safe, he betrays their trust by describing an evil apparition anyway. It's atmospheric, as these are all likely to be, but all very familiar.
19. A Vignette (1936)
In his final story, James doesn't concern himself with trifles like making a point or telling a story, but instead seemingly recounts a childhood nightmare verbatim. I can relate to sensing the "impression" of something coming up the stairs, even when your five senses give you nothing to go on, and of being inexplicably terrified by an inexplicable face.
No one had the chance to ask the author how much of this was memory or fancy (the setting is supposedly autobiographical, at least), but it feels true enough all the same.
18. Count Magnus (1902)
I'm not normally a fan of stories that punish the curious, but this morbidly nosy travel writer had it coming. The 'ambiguous' ghouls are always just a frame, rotation or clear sky away from being clearly depicted, but James is less candid with the desecrated victims they leave behind.
It's not like it's a long story, but was it really necessary to visit the mausoleum on three separate occasions to see all the locks fall off? Maybe he was struggling to fill that final magazine column.
17. The Haunted Dolls' House (1922)
This is a lot like the unwieldily-titled Punch and Judy story from the previous collection, again involving an extended dream-like vision that ultimately unearths a murder. The vision itself is as good as those sequences usually are – you could make a context-free compilation of all James' ghostie bits, and it would be all the best bits – but aside from the uncanniness, it's not really gripping or unnerving.
I prefer to take it as a shared dream that they're all having, even though that's not exactly how it's presented, because otherwise we have to accept grown adults just lying in bed and watching the mannequin drama play out over several nights rather than getting up and jolly well inspecting this world-changing revelation.
16. The Fenstanton Witch (before 1929)
I wonder what whispers there were, in the decades before it finally saw print at the end of the century, about this lost M. R. James story that the author had probably written by the time of his final collection, but elected to leave out. Was it just not all that good? Or so potentially upsetting that he couldn't in good conscience allow it into the world?
The climax with the hellish bat thing is stranger and more descriptive than we're used to getting in these famously suggestive tales. That's one thing I liked about it. The other was that our amateur meddling magicians weren't wicked wizards for once, but a couple of otherwise decent lads who got a bit carried away and tried their best to protect themselves with ineffectual charms. You'd think it would be apt for A Warning to the Curious, really.
Maybe I missed something, but it seemed that the supposed sinister qualities of the number 13 didn't end up being of significance after all, and the nocturnal room could just as well have had any number. Explicitly Christian superstitions have always hindered my enjoyment of vampire stories, so it was nice that the irrational room-naming convention was lightly mocked here.
I mean, it's still a story about a magic room with a witch in it, but it wasn't as silly as it could have been. Doubtless an influence on Lovecraft's own masonry-warping 'Dreams in the Witch-house.'
14. An Episode of Cathedral History (1913)
This isn't the best of James' many church-bound tales, but with its distinctive ghoul, at least it stands out.
You can take it as the author branching out into vampires if you really need to, but his hairy nocturnal nuisance is more Max Schreck than Lugosi, mixed with a bit of Chewbacca. They're all filed under 'ghost stories,' you don't need to look further than that.
I don't think there are overt displays of the supernatural, so it's possible to interpret it as a deranged cultist who can't take criticism passing useless scraps of paper to equally superstitious fools who all run around wasting their time to shuffle off the "curse." I find it more entertaining that way.
12. The Diary of Mr Poynter (1919)
The One with the Hair Monster might have been a shark-jumping embarrassment if it hadn't been written as an almost Wodehousian comedy from the onset.
I enjoyed the daftness and the change of pace. It doesn't make any sense, but I think there's a moral that men should wear sensible hair in there.
11. A Neighbour's Landmark (1924)
I wonder if James regretted not having made these interchangeable, paper-shuffling, god-bothering narrators the same character at any point? It wouldn't take much work to adapt them that way.
This is the same sort of thing he's been writing for 30 years, but there are minor touches that make it stand out, which is all-important to avoid tedium this late on when you're reading chronologically. The screeching woman in an unassuming open field might be one of his outright scariest phantoms, or among those you'd least like to encounter personally.
10. The Experiment: A New Year's Eve Ghost Story (1931)
It's only short, but this historical yarn of necromancy, mariticide and decomposing apparitions set against a backdrop of pestilence is one of James' unremittingly blackest. I liked it for that.
9. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1904)
Name of the Rose or Da Vinci Code fans should appreciate this ecclesiastical trezer hunt from a century earlier with its numerical clues in stained glass, hidden, jumbled text and a simplistic cipher ('The Dancing Men' was published the year before, maybe James was getting in on that action). It's all quite enjoyable.
It remembers to be a ghost story towards the end, when the sought-after gold is obtained and the plunderer has an encounter in the dark with a mouldy, grasping thing. Why did he go to so much trouble to point you to the gold if he's then going to haunt you until you put it back? So everyone else gets to have a go?
8. The Mezzotint (1904)
If there's a precedent for this story of a quantum engraving that changes when unobserved to depict a chilling sequence of events, then I take all my praise back.
The framing story of boring academic life is as irrelevant as the frame of the mezzotint itself, it's all about that advancing, grotesque figure and the waning moon. I've always had a mental image, and the attempts that show up on Google Image Search don't come close.
The framing story of boring academic life is as irrelevant as the frame of the mezzotint itself, it's all about that advancing, grotesque figure and the waning moon. I've always had a mental image, and the attempts that show up on Google Image Search don't come close.
7. Lost Hearts (1895)
If you read this as an adult and find yourself snorting derisively at its completely predictable plot and unoriginal apparitions, appreciate that it's not for you. The clue's in the 11-year-old reader surrogate.
This is one to read to the kids, or show them the 1973 BBC adaptation if you can't be bothered. It could teach them not to judge by appearances when the eerie ghosts turn out to be the goodies, and to be wary of wealthy eccentrics who court disadvantaged children.
6. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral (1910)
All these cloisters, chapels, libraries and enchanted trees are already starting to blur together, and I'm only on the second collection. That's the main point of these notes, really: to help me remember which stories I particularly liked, for whatever inconstant reason, rather than allowing them to fade into a murky haze like happened the last time I listened through most of these seven years ago and only remembered a couple.
This is one of the better ones (I think). The villain is no supernatural trickster or mad eccentric this time, just an ambitious clergyman who commits an evil deed to get ahead and ends up getting tormented and ultimately punished for it. Supernatural justice is on the good side this time, it's a fickle thing. The one with a cat ghost, just to jog my memory when I read this in 2024. No, it's gone.
5. The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance (1913)
If you're hoping that the disappearance of Uncle Frank will be satisfyingly tied up and adequately explained by the end, you might be disappointed. This is M. R. James, not A. C. Doyle, though it reads more like Thomas Ligotti.
With its extended Punch & Judy nightmare sequence at the half-way point, rather than making us wait for the end for the weirdness, it's one of his most consistently creepy.
4. A View from a Hill (1925)
Seemingly aware that his formula's getting a tad repetitive, James goes for a different approach and comes up with a proto-Twilight Zone episode about a curious pair of binoculars that seemingly allow the user to glimpse things as they used to be.
When observing from afar, this is just magical rather than unsettling, even if we know that's not a dummy hanging from the anachronistic gallows. But then he has to go and investigate the ominous hill in person, doesn't he? The anecdotal accounts about Baxter's antics sketch out one of James' most entertaining morbid weirdos.
3. The Ash-tree (1904)
James' early stories alternate between the city and the country, and I'm always more partial to a bit of folk horror.
This gruesome and morally confused tale of a witch's posthumous revenge is less clear-cut and more ambiguous than 'Lost Hearts,' unless you suspected that the titular tree was harbouring a brood of wailing spider-squirrels all along. Surprisingly, a 1970s BBC budget actually did them justice.
2. Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance (1911)
Not wanting to short-change his readers, James bulked out the page count of his second collection by ending on a slightly longer story that's basically a mash-up of a lot of his best ones.
You've got the country manor with its enigmatic foliage ('The Ash-tree' et al), the curious nephew and his strange, reclusive uncle ('Lost Hearts'), gruesome carvings ('Barchester Cathedral'), nocturnal visitations ('Whistle' et al), twisting reality ('Number 13') and cryptic clues all over the place ('Treasure of Abbot Thomas'). It may feel more like an affectionate fan pastiche than the real article, but I still think it's one of the best.
But then, I've always liked mazes.
1. 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad' (1903)
What took the stubborn Dana Scully over seven years on The X-Files is accomplished over the course of a single spooky seaside sojourn for our sceptical professor, who learns there are more things on Earth than he dreamt of, and that he's now cursed to dream of for the rest of his days.
We know it's a ghost story and he doesn't, at first anyway, which keeps things nicely or frustratingly tense as he casually observes a running apparition and mucks about opening and closing his eyes while something tosses and turns right there in the spare bed.
I'd credit James with a sense of humour for wrapping his ghost in actual bedding for wont of a visible form, if I was sure this wasn't the origin of that trope.
We know it's a ghost story and he doesn't, at first anyway, which keeps things nicely or frustratingly tense as he casually observes a running apparition and mucks about opening and closing his eyes while something tosses and turns right there in the spare bed.
I'd credit James with a sense of humour for wrapping his ghost in actual bedding for wont of a visible form, if I was sure this wasn't the origin of that trope.
