"There are some authors one wishes one had never read in order to have the joy of reading them for the first time. For me, M. R. James is one of these...
James has a curious technique of withholding information in a way that allows a very free play to the reader's imagination as well as creating a peculiarly uneasy kind of suspense...
His stories begin quietly, often with a description of a place, a town or a country house or library, and his traveller to whom in a little while dreadful things will happen, is a scholarly person. There are - at first - no ghosts and no demons, only the a gradually increasing , indefinable, slow menace. And James's characters bring trouble upon themselves by such simple innocent actions, by being a little too curious, for instance, by merely examining an old manuscript or borrowing a certain book, by picking up an apparently harmless object on the beach.
It is quiet and comfortable in the museum, the hotel bedchamber or the set of rooms in the college. Of course one is quite alone with one's incunabula, a candle burning, a pipe of tobacco, the curtains drawn against the windy night. Possibly hung about one's neck is a crucifix inexplicably given one by a nervous serving maid. There is an inscription given in some dead language to be translated, works of reference to be consulted. Still, eventually the work is done, the illuminated page turned, and one happens to look up - but what isthat in the corner of the room, in the shadows where the light from the candle cannot quite reach..."
~ author Ruth Rendell on James and some individual tales.
Has anyone read Montague Rhodes James?
Currently my favorite of Victorian gothic/horror writers whose influence can be felt through weird fiction masters of the early 20th Century to modern writers such as King and Straub, experienced in both television (Rod Serling's written programs) and film (Jacques Tourneur's classic
Night of the Demon was adapted from
Casting the Runes).
Like Poe before him and Lovecraft, Montague Rhodes James is a universal horror template.
I frown on reading e-texts* of James's work preferring the pulp but here is an excellent site,
Frank Adey's M. R. James Page with eleven of his shorts available free for perusal.
(*I give highest recommendation to
The Ash-Tree,
Number 13,
The Treasures of Abbot Thomas,
Casting The Runes,
The Mezzotint, and
Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book in that order for new readers.)
Or preferably wait til you have a bloody book in yer grasp, lasses and lads.
