Recommendations from our site
” I can barely read these stories myself. It’s the only literature that gives me nightmares. This collection was read to me by a teacher at school when I was eight years old, on dark autumnal Friday afternoons. I re-read them as an undergraduate, and was absolutely terrified once again.” Read more...
Nick Groom, Literary Scholar
“James, I think, is the most frightening writer I have ever encountered. It is all in the set-up. It is all in his ability to create an extraordinary, unsettling atmosphere. James was a Cambridge don, and a manuscript scholar of enormous distinction. You have to understand his ghost stories as a by-product of his formal scholarly research.” Read more...
Darryl Jones, Literary Scholar
“M R James is arguably the greatest master of the English ghost story. His stories are considerably grimmer and grislier than ghost stories had been up until then. He wrote these stories initially to be read to friends at Christmas. They were only published later—he wrote them down for the telling. That style of candlelit scary storytelling is called Jamesian after him. And the other thing worth saying about James is that his ambition was to be as frightening as possible. He certainly succeeds.” Read more...
The best books on Horror Stories
Ramsey Campbell, Novelist
MR James’s Ghost Stories are available as an audiobook, read by the legendary British actor Sir Derek Jacobi.
