Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and nighttime settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries provide settings for unbearable menace from creatures seeking retribution and harm. These stories have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb.

This edition presents all of James' published ghost stories, including the unforgettable Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad and Casting the Runes, and an appendix of James' writings on the ghost story. Darryl Jones' introduction and notes provide a fascinating insight into James's background and his mastery of the genre he made his own.

Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot. Lonely country houses, remote inns, ancient churches or the manuscript collections of great libraries provide settings for unbearable menace, from creatures seeking retribution and harm. These stories have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb.

This edition presents all of James's published ghost stories, including the unforgettable 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad' and 'Casting the Runes', and an appendix of James's writings on the ghost story. Darryl Jones's introduction and notes provide a fascinating insight into James's background and his mastery of the genre he made his own.

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James's ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These volumes are both the culmination of the nineteenth-century ghost story tradition and the inspiration for much of the best twentieth-century work in this genre. Included in this collection are such landmark tales as Count Magnus, set in the wilds of Sweden; Number 13, a distinctive tale about a haunted hotel room; Casting the Runes, a richly complex tale of sorcery that served as the basis for the classic horror film Curse of the Demon; and Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, one of the most frightening tales in literature. The appendix includes several rare texts, including A Night in King's College Chapel, James's first known ghost story.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The first book to supply the English reader with a comprehensive view of the apocryphal literature connected to the New Testament. It contains translations of all the important texts in the style of the Authorized Version, and makes available the results of historic researches into their origin, history, and value.

In volume two of the only annotated edition of M. R. James's complete writings currently available, Penguin Classics brings together tales from James's final two works, A Thin Ghost and Others and A Warning to the Curious. In these stories, James continues his fearsome transformation of the ghost story from its nineteenth-century heritage, drawing upon his deep knowledge of medieval history and biblical curiosa. This edition features a number of little-known tales that have rarely been assembled, including The Fenstation Witch, presented here for the first time in a corrected text, a new translation of Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories, and a number of James's essays.

Edited and with an introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Dive into this collection of exquisite, classic horror stories--just make sure to have the lights on and the doors locked!

First published in 1904, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary contains eight tales of supernatural horror by genre master M.R. James. Highly regarded as a masterwork of horror, this collection is a must-have for fans of the frightful.

The stories in this collection include: Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, Lost Hearts, The Mezzotint, The Ash-Tree. Number 13, Count Magnus, Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad, and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.

M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror.

As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James, 'Stories I Have Tried To Write', which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are 'Casting the Runes', 'Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you, My Lad', 'The Tractate Middoth', 'The Ash Tree' and 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook'.

'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'. Ruth Rendell

While engrossed in an account of the death of a student obsessed with his own hair, a man leans down to absently pet his dog--oblivious of the true nature of the creature crouching beside him. This classic ghost story by M.R. James is a spooky holiday delight.

World-renowned illustrator Seth returns with three new Christmas ghost stories for 2020.

Special, collectable hardcover edition for Ramsey Campbell's 60 years in publication.

With his subtle sense of dread and use modern settings, M.R. James' ghost stories formed a firm foundation for the modern horror story with his presence felt in all forms of literature and media. This special collectable edition of short stories features a new introduction by the greatest current inheritor of the Jamesian mantle, Ramsey Campbell, along with one of Ramsey's own tales.

The Ramsey Campbell Special Editions. Campbell is the greatest inheritor of a tradition that reaches back through H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the early Gothic writers. The dark, masterful work of the painter Henry Fuseli, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, is used on these special editions to invoke early literary investigations into the supernatural.

The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James is the title of M. R. James' omnibus collection of ghost stories, published in 1931, bringing together all but four of his ghost stories (which had yet to be published).

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a medievalist scholar; Provost of King's College, Cambridge. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. His stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasize the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions. (wikipedia.org)

Accessible language and carefully controlled vocabulary build students' reading confidence.

Introductions at the beginning of each story, illustrations throughout, and glossaries help build comprehension.

Before, during, and after reading activities included in the back of each book strengthen student comprehension.

Audio versions of selected titles provide great models of intonation and pronunciation of difficult words.

There has been much written about Montague Rhodes James that needs no repetition here. To those who know anything of the literature of the supernatural his name and work stands on the highest tier in the Pantheon of the greatest writers of the genre. James brought his horrors to his readers genteelly wrapped in the fine prose of an academic often describing the apparently logical lives and worlds of fictional nondescript academics and antiquarians. Brilliantly, his menaces creep into the safe lives of unsuspecting, undynamic personalities-into the very fabric of the ordinary in notably commonplace scenarios. In this lies the James genius, for he understood well that it is the subtle menace of approaching horror that builds the most terror and that what we all fear most, born out of our primeval fear of darkness, is the unknown and the unfathomable. James' ghosts rarely come shrieking out of a closet. They hint at their presence, they unsettle and then they approach with dreadful inexorability. Among those who know the genre of supernatural fiction well many regard M. R. James as its finest exponent. For those who are yet to experience his delicious chills this volume will be a revelation and an abiding pleasure.
This special Leonaur edition of all the M. R. James supernatural and weird fiction completed and published in his lifetime contains the enduringly popular 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, ' 'Lost Hearts' and 'The Ash-Tree' as well as less familiar gems such as 'The Tractate Middoth' and 'Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance.' In all, a feast of thirty-four small masterpieces including James' strange novella for younger readers 'The Five Jars.' Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket-ideal for collectors or as a special gift to be forever treasured.

There has been much written about Montague Rhodes James that needs no repetition here. To those who know anything of the literature of the supernatural his name and work stands on the highest tier in the Pantheon of the greatest writers of the genre. James brought his horrors to his readers genteelly wrapped in the fine prose of an academic often describing the apparently logical lives and worlds of fictional nondescript academics and antiquarians. Brilliantly, his menaces creep into the safe lives of unsuspecting, undynamic personalities-into the very fabric of the ordinary in notably commonplace scenarios. In this lies the James genius, for he understood well that it is the subtle menace of approaching horror that builds the most terror and that what we all fear most, born out of our primeval fear of darkness, is the unknown and the unfathomable. James' ghosts rarely come shrieking out of a closet. They hint at their presence, they unsettle and then they approach with dreadful inexorability. Among those who know the genre of supernatural fiction well many regard M. R. James as its finest exponent. For those who are yet to experience his delicious chills this volume will be a revelation and an abiding pleasure.
This special Leonaur edition of all the M. R. James supernatural and weird fiction completed and published in his lifetime contains the enduringly popular 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, ' 'Lost Hearts' and 'The Ash-Tree' as well as less familiar gems such as 'The Tractate Middoth' and 'Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance.' In all, a feast of thirty-four small masterpieces including James' strange novella for younger readers 'The Five Jars.' Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket-ideal for collectors or as a special gift to be forever treasured.

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey horny and wrinkled. He flew out of his chair with deadly inconceivable terror at his heart.

The art of telling a ghost story is a refined one and Montague Rhodes James was a master of it. With gentle cunning, he draws the reader into a narrative that at first seems innocuous but which by gentle turns becomes darker and darker until he transfixes you with his prose, creating the most unforgettable, alarming and frightening images. This volume contains all his timeless masterpieces from the four collections of his eerie tales: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925).

With an Afterword by David Stuart Davies.