Antiquarian horror

IN compiling his celebrated ghost stories, M. R. James wrote of his preference for ‘malevolent or odious’ ghosts, noting that local legends may contain ‘amiable and helpful apparitions’ but he had ‘no use for them’. His tales are disturbing in part for their convincingly described and often superficially appealing settings—cathedrals, clerical residences, hotels or country houses with endless, shadowy, portrait-filled rooms. In The Ash-tree (1904), the bachelor don speaks through the narrator about the ‘strong attraction’ of even mildly second-rate, small country houses, describing those of Eastern England as ‘rather dank little buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some 80 to a 100 acres’. He notes their noble trees and oak paling, their ‘pillared portico perhaps stuck onto a Queen Anne house which has been faced with stucco, to bring it into line with the “Grecian taste” of the end of the 18th century’; their double-height halls ‘open to the roof’, and libraries ‘where you may find anything from a Psalter of the 13th century to a Shakespeare quarto… I wish to have one of those houses, and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly’.

His unsettling evocations of ghosts draw on his knowledge of medieval demons

The tale of (1911), begins with another scholarly bachelor, who has inherited his estranged uncle’s estate at ‘Wilsthorpe’ in Eastern England. As Mr Humphreys comes up from the station, the reader shares his first impressions of an ‘oddly proportioned’ building, a ‘very tall red-brick house with a plain parapet concealing the roof almost entirely. It gave the impression of a townhouse set down in the country’ . Mr Humphreys is pleased to discover the house has a large library, with three windows facing east, where he could imagine himself being ‘especially happy’. He is at this point yet to discover the horror that lies in the garden, with its semi-abandoned maze.