Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

“The first of two volumes of short horror tales written to be read aloud by the fire on Christmas. Sometimes published as one edition — all stories of the highest quality, a number of which have been adapted as 1-hour specials for the BBC’s off-and-on Ghost Stories for Christmas traditional broadcast. Around the turn of the twentieth century — so, some time before Stephen King set to work grounding his supernatural horror in elaborately plausible, relatable back stories and the histories of small towns with a dark past, and before Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, and so many Hollywood movies did the same by way of paranormal experts with ghost-detection machinery and so on — there was M.R. James: English author, medievalist scholar, provost of King’s College in Cambridge and later, Eton. With his love of literature in general, as well as his keen interest in old books and manuscripts and medieval history, James brought a refreshing sense of realism to the uncanny and horrific by couching it snugly in the mundane and highly academic. Among his many short stories, some favorites of mine are: "The Mezzotint"

"The Ash-tree"

"Count Magnus"

“Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad”

"The Stalls of Barchester"

“The Tractate Middoth”

“Whistle, and I'll Come to You” has been adapted 3 times — the 1956 adaptation is apparently lost? Maybe not. Either way I haven’t seen it. But the 1968 and 2010 versions very much exist. The 1968 version is far superior to the 2010 version, despite the fact that John Hurt, RIP, stars in the 2010 version and is as great as always. Productions of some of the other stories are very good too, especially ones from the 1970s that respect James’s masterful use of restraint in order to communicate something haunting through subtlety as opposed to shock value.”