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    Ghost Stories
    Ghost Stories
    Ghost Stories
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Ghost Stories

    Written by M. R. James

    Narrated by Sir Michael Hordern

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.

    Horror, mystery and suspense abound in this collection of stories from the king of ghostly tales, M. R. James.

    Featuring stories that have haunted listeners for over one hundred years, such as The Haunted Doll’s House and The Ash Tree, this collection is read by critically acclaimed star of screen and stage, Sir Michael Hordern.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 15, 2020
    ISBN9780008447625
    Ghost Stories
    Author

    M. R. James

    Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was a curate, but the family moved soon afterwards to Great Livermere in Suffolk. James attended Eton College and later King's College Cambridge where he won many awards and scholarships. From 1894 to 1908 he was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and from 1905 to 1918 was Provost of King's College. In 1913, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University for two years. In 1918 he was installed as Provost of Eton. A distinguished medievalist and scholar of international status, James published many works on biblical and historical antiquarian subjects. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1930. His ghost story writing began almost as a divertissement from his academic work and as a form of entertainment for his colleagues. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published in 1904. He never married and died in 1936.

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    Reviews for Ghost Stories

    4/5

    41 ratings26 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The Collected Ghost Stories of M R JamesIn many ways, M R James was destined to be a superlative writer of ghost stories. Born in 1862, his interest in antiquarian matters was evident even during boyhood and he spent the whole of his long bachelor life steeped in the past: first at Eton and then Cambridge as an undergraduate and subsequently an academic, later completing the full circle by retiring from the university to return to his old school as provost.To create memorable ghost stories requires the writer to connect profoundly with a past that intrudes upon the present world. In fact, the author really needs to be immersed in the past. Even when those around them cannot feel the tug or lure of the centuries of lives that have gone before, they still need to remain powerfully vivid to the writer of ghost stories. M R James was such a man. There are moments in his fiction when the present seems to cause him more fear than the past ever could. He could combine the two more effectively in a ghost story than any other writer has managed, even during the golden age of the ghost story we attribute to the Victorians.Another part of the reason why M R James' fiction is so vivid is that he wrote about what he knew. Boarding school, the ecclesiastical world and academic life often feature in his writing, as do the country homes he visited during the holidays. Each environment lends itself well as a setting for a ghost story, being essentially backward looking into the past, and (as an older building) providing a credible location for a spirit to have established itself hundreds of years ago and lingered ever since.
    • 5/5
      You will think these stories aren't affecting you until you find yourself reflecting about them days later. Very penetrating, influences psychologically.
    • 4/5
      Written in a more innocent and graceful era, MR James's ghost stories are subtle, with very polite and, at times, utterly chilling ghosts. I enjoyed most of them, with some of the stories giving me delicious goosebumps (The Ash Tree, Number 13, Oh Whistle & I'll come to thee, my Lad, The Uncommon Prayer Book, Wailing Well and others).One issue I had with this particular text, was that the explanatory notes were by means of an * (no differentiaton within each story) and the note itself was at the back of the book, rather than at the foot of the relevant page, which would have made reading the explanations without interrupting the pace and tension of the story a lot easier. In the end, I stopped looking at the notes and just enjoyed the stories, although I would have liked to know what some references meant.Quaint and appealing, these ghost stories are a great in bed late at night ...!
    • 3/5
      These are great classic ghost stories, that belong to a bygone era but that are nevertheless satisfying.They include "Casting the Runes" which was made into "Night of the Demon", one of my favourite scary films
    • 5/5
      M R James is the greatest writer of ghost stories there has ever been. These stories are wonderful - I've read this book several times and always read James stories when I inevitably come across them in anthologies. No matter how much I think I know them they are always worth re-reading. I find it heartbreaking that 'horror' these days has to be blood-soaked and full of sex. You don't find that in James, you just find scary stories, beautifully written, atmospheric and downright enjoyable. They comfort me strangely even when the hair on the back of my neck is sticking up! My personal favourite is 'Number 13' about the room number thirteen in a hotel which only appears at night complete with a deranged, dancing inhabitant. The only thing wrong with M R James is that he didn't write enough stories!
    • 5/5
      Indeholder "Introduction", "Preface", "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook", "Lost Hearts", "The Mezzotint", "The Ash Tree", "Number 13", "Count Magnus", "'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad'", "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", "A School Story", "The Rose Garden", "The Tractate Middoth", "Casting the Runes", "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral", "Martin's Close", "Mr Humphreys and Hit Inheritance", "The Residence at Whitminster", "The Diary of Mr Poynter", "An Episode of Cathedral History", "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance", "Two Doctors", "The Haunted Dolls' House", "The Uncommon Prayer-Book", "A Neighbour's Landmark", "A View from a Hill", "A Warning to the Curious", "An Evening's Entertainment", "There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard", "Rats", "After Dark in the Playing Fields", "Wailing Well", "Stories I have Tried to Write"."Introduction" handler om ???"Preface" handler om ???"Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" handler om ???"Lost Hearts" handler om ???"The Mezzotint" handler om ???"The Ash Tree" handler om ???"Number 13" handler om ???"Count Magnus" handler om ???"'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad'" handler om ???"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" handler om ???"A School Story" handler om ???"The Rose Garden" handler om ???"The Tractate Middoth" handler om ???"Casting the Runes" handler om ???"The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" handler om ???"Martin's Close" handler om ???"Mr Humphreys and Hit Inheritance" handler om ???"The Residence at Whitminster" handler om ???"The Diary of Mr Poynter" handler om ???"An Episode of Cathedral History" handler om ???"The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance" handler om ???"Two Doctors" handler om ???"The Haunted Dolls' House" handler om ???"The Uncommon Prayer-Book" handler om ???"A Neighbour's Landmark" handler om ???"A View from a Hill" handler om ???"A Warning to the Curious" handler om ???"An Evening's Entertainment" handler om ???"There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard" handler om ???"Rats" handler om ???"After Dark in the Playing Fields" handler om ???"Wailing Well" handler om ???"Stories I have Tried to Write" handler om ???Aldeles glimrende erstatning for aircondition på en hed sommerdag.
    • 5/5
      These tales were originally issued in four separate volumes in the early 20th century. They have a merited atmosphere of scholarship in medievalism and the black arts and have been frightening successive generations ever since their first appearances in print.
    • 4/5
      I will doubtless court the wrath of James devotees by saying I was somewhat disappointed by this book.Not that it was bad. Some of the stories (notably "'Oh Whistle and I'll come to you my lad'" and "Casting the Runes" are well known and justly so. I also find "The Mezzotint" agreeably creepy.But tastes have changed and many of the stories, despite their excellent writing, have dated badly, seeming tame in comparison with today's more bloodthirsty writers. Almost nothing happens in many of them and in others I was left thinking "Huh?".Maybe a reread in a few months time will yield more. We shall see
    • 3/5
      An interesting collection of ghost stories. James does have a knack for the genre, but there are a few that feel too much the same. My favorite was "The Mezzotint", which was creepy and easy to follow.
    • 5/5
      I often take Montague on holiday with me. He doesn't take up much room and he doesn't eat all the Baby Bells. I'm talking about Montague Rhodes James - my favourite writer of ghost stories. This time Montague is telling me the stories that didn't get printed in his four haunting anthologies. I prefer the individual publications to the doorstop collection here. It's pretty evident why these six stories didn't make it into the original publications. 1. The Uncommon Prayer-Book 2. A Neighbour's Landmark 3. Rats 4. The Experiment 5. The Malice of Inanimate Objects 6. A VignetteThey are a little rough around the edges, lacking the gloss of a story that an author has done tinkering with. There are still chilling moments to be had but there are no classics present unfortunately. Also included are several excerpts from prefaces by James that were published in his collections and other ghost story anthologies. They are very honest descriptions and opinions on the writing process and the qualities James valued in the creation of stories of this genre. He also talks about that drawer that all writers possess that houses the unfinished writings, or unused ideas. It's all invaluable stuff for writers interested in developing a style that might be influenced by James and others of his degree of adeptness.
    • 4/5
      Rereading these stories still made me shake a bit. Antique and dated, but in the nicest sense.
    • 4/5
      Rating: 4 of 5My first experience with M.R. James - intrigued."The Rose Garden" made me shiver. The face in the bush, totally creepy!"Casting the Runes," when Dunning reached under his pillow, I jerked in my seat. Good times."...for happening to move his hand which hung down over the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair...But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, made him look over the arm (p. 226)." EEK! This one freaked me out, big time.The authenticity of James' characters and settings was most impressive.
    • 4/5
      I read most of these as a child in another edition; they were terrifying, particularly "The Haunted Doll's House," "The Mezzotint," and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."
    • 4/5
      Elegant, understated, well-written stories of demons, pagan rituals and haunted objects. Extremely enjoyable, especially compared to so many trashy and inferior contemporary ghost stories. Excellent footnotes add to the experience.
    • 4/5
      Unlike the non-stop, bucket of blood horror stories of today, the Collected Ghost Stores of M.R. James are subdued, implied, and, at times, quite chilling. This collection contained 30 stories and for me not all of the stories worked, but there were some that definitely sent shivers down my back and a need to turn up the lights. Mostly set in England, many of these stories relied on the author’s knowledge of church history and the horror is almost always indirect and implied. The author trusts his audiences’ imagination to fill in the blanks and this, I believe, is what makes these stories so good. Whether it is being trapped on a dark staircase with the knowledge that something is with you or the sound of scratching outside your bedroom door late at night, the terror comes from the reader’s own mental images.Rich in atmosphere, these dark and twisty stories are the perfect way to prepare oneself for Halloween. This is a book that I will put back on my shelves and pull down again on a future rainy, windy October night.
    • 5/5
      Perhaps even better than Poe or Lovecraft, MR James knew that good horror writing rests on erudition & arcane detail. A James story may seem more delightfully scholarly than scary - but it's never harmless. A joy to read, at every sentence.
    • 4/5
      For the most part a chilling collection of short stories based around ghostly experiences. The collection started and ended with strong stories, though I felt a few in the middle of the book were a bit hard going and took too long to get to the point. So pretty good overall.
    • 5/5
      MR James was an extremely learned man who must have encountered many musty tomes in his everyday work. I love all the dusty detail of intellectual research which is set out and dissected before James unleashes one of his hideous ghoulish creations on us. I find the ghost stories of MR James great morbid fun. It has taken me a while to get round to reading all of James' work, as I find the stories a bit too scary to be read in bed at night.
    • 4/5
      Well, the show went on, and the stories kept on becoming a little more terrifying each time, and the children were mesmerized into complete silence. At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park--Lufford, I mean--in the evening. Every child in the room could recognize the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered, and what it must have meant to the children doesn't bear thinking of.M.R. James wrote his ghost stories between the 1890s and 1930s and most of them were initially told to colleagues and students at King's College Cambridge and Eton. A typical story would take place in an ancient building or on the desolate east coast of England, with a horror from the past being awoken when the unlucky protagonist unwittingly disturbs its rest. I really didn't like reading about a man reaching under his pillow only to touch a wet hairy mouth! Not a good story to read just before going to bed.I was wondering why the white hopping thing in "Casting the Runes" seemed familiar even though that isn't one of the stories I have read before, but I think that is is because one of the model-makers in "The Bat Tattoo" by Rusell Hoban made a clockwork model showing that scene.
    • 4/5
      Montague Rhodes James brings the classic British understatement to the field of horror stories and makes them terrifying beyond imagination. His writing is without any frills; there is very little by the way of atmosphere-building; and the stories themselves seem to be an odd form of reportage. By going against convention, M. R. James creates a nightmare world which is more frightening than that of any of his more traditional contemporaries. He is helped in this by his encyclopaedic knowledge of Church History.

      James' ghosts are most exclusively European, mostly British. They emanate from the Celtic woodlands of pre-Roman Britain, and inhabit the wooded copses and cavernous churches of the English countryside. 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.

      I would rank Casting the Runes at the very top of these gems. This story has given me delicious nightmares ever since I first encountered it during my teens. "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" is another story which stays in the mind. Mind you, that does not mean the others are lesser-these are just personal favourites.

      Curl up in your favourite corner during a rainy night, listen to the wind howling in the rafters, and read these stories preferably in dim light. That is, if you dare...

    • 4/5
      Henry James once said that the most effective ghost stories are connected to everyday life at a thousand different points. M.R. James took this to heart; the most effective stories herein are those that take some normal, everyday occurance and find the terror lurking beneath the surface. The stories all begin rather pleasantly; there are polite conversations and new discoveries and some very funny turns of phrase. In some cases, there's a gradual buildup, a sense of menace that pervades the entire piece. In others, the horrific twist takes the characters by surprise. In all the stories, though, there's a real sense that this could happen to you.James does a masterful job of combining the ordinary and the strange. In each of these stories, the characters find themselves involved in some normal occurance that is nonetheless outside the norm. Many of them spend time in hotels, buildings that are both profoundly normal and divorced from the norm. Others make exciting new purchases and bring objects both everyday and sinister into their homes. A hotel room with three windows suddenly has only two. A picture changes slightly every time the viewer returns to it. An empty bed isn't. In each case, the reader can imagine just such a thing happening to them. The true terror behind the stories lies not in the tales themselve but in the way they spark the reader's imagination.If you have any interest in ghost stories, you really ought to pick up any of James's collections. He's exerted a huge influence on many, if not all, of the ghost story writers who've come after him. COLLECTED GHOST STORIES contains almost all his stories, but diehards may wish to pick up the COMPLETE GHOST STORIES instead. Penguin also publishes a gorgeous little edition of selected stories entitled THE HAUNTED DOLL'S HOUSE.(This review originally appeared in a slightly different form on my blog, Stella Matutina).
    • 4/5
      I think the stories are arranged largely in chronological order as there's a marked increase in quality as you come to the middle of the book.He's a master of fantastic understatement; I had to re-read a few passages, asking myself "Did that really just happen?"He gives as sense of reality by having the events seemingly reported but the downside is that you're removed emotionally from the action and no particular story stands out. As a result I found the sameness a bit of a strain towards the end.Overall though, a most unusual and enjoyable book.
    • 5/5
      A mix of stories mostly set in older england. Discovering things better left untouched. There is hardly nay gore in any of these stories and very seldom even any violence. Yet they manage to leave a shiver down the spine and an uneasy feeling when left on your own. Masterfully written.
    • 4/5
      Born in 1862, M. R. James was a Victorian with a love of ghost stories. Many of the tales in this collection were meant to be read aloud a Christmas or New Year gatherings; it shows in their conversational tone. There are 33 stories in over 400 pages- with 48 pages of notes. I’ve never before seen endnotes in fiction, but I found them helpful. The author makes many references to places and events in England that an American would likely not understand, and the many colloquialisms of the time sometimes baffled me until I looked in the back of the book. I read right through this book, which turned out to not be the right way of approaching it. Read one after the other, they tended to run together and lose their effect. These stories would be best read one or two in an evening, perhaps read out loud- preferably by firelight. But it was a library book, so I persevered. ‘Ghost stories’ is not really the right name for a lot of these stories. Many of them feature not ghosts but demons, things that go bump in the night, haunted or bespelled pictures, rooms, binoculars, hills and other inanimate objects. James seemed to have a peculiar horror of animate fabric, as it features in several tales, in the form of evil curtains, pillowcases, blankets, etc., which sounds silly but when it comes down to it, would you want to confront drapes that form into a human shape and try to smother you? For the main part (although there are a couple of exceptions) the horror in these stories in not of the modern variety where the gore is splattered across the pages. James creates a sense of disturbing unease, a feeling that puts the hair on the back of your neck up, the sense that something is really NOT all right, and that if one is smart, one will get the heck out of that house/cemetery/library before the thing you don’t really see becomes visible. Highly enjoyable, but take your time reading it.
    • 5/5
      Quite possibly the finest pure ghost stories ever written in the English language. James explored a common theme through these tales: the comfortable world of Edwardian gentleman-scholars being violently breached by horrific supernatural events, usually rooted in the grim and bloody past of Britain. Simple inanimate objects are usually the source of this malevolent power; examples include a rusted whistle ("Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad"), a piece of notebook paper ("Casting the Runes"), an old engraving ("The Mezzotint"); and various old books ("Canon Alberic's Scrapbook"; "The Tractate Middoth"; "An Uncommon Prayer-Book"). Too, nobody could create the atmosphere of lurking menace and dread quite like James, and make the eruption of otherworldly terror into the placid English-academic setting so convincing. Horror greats from H.P. Lovecraft to Clive Barker have cribbed from James; read his stories to see why.
    • 4/5
      A collection of Nancy Drew "ghost" stories, most of which end up to be not ghosts at all, but a good book anyways.