Collected Ghost Stories

M.R. James, a scholar of medieval manuscripts who spent much of his life in Cambridge and at Eton, wrote these tales of the supernatural. Many were first read aloud to friends and students, and that spoken quality shows in their measured, conversational narration.

In James's stories, an ordinary find, such as an old letter, a manuscript or a carved object, can release forces no one intended to meet. The horror tends to gather in shut-up rooms and at night, where a character's own uneasy imagination does much of the work.

The collection suits readers who enjoy classic English ghost stories and slow-building dread rather than gore. It gathers the author's supernatural fiction in one volume, giving readers a full sense of his unsettling, scholarly approach to the uncanny.