67. M.R. James - Collected Ghost Stories (Part 1)

For this week, I thought we needed to head into a completely different direction. M.R. James' Collected Ghost Stories are certainly world's apart from the E.L. James' series (even though the authors' names are really similar). James is famous for his ghost stories from the start of the 1900's. 

For this week I've read a few of the stories in this collection, not all of them yet:

• Canon Alberic's Scrapbook
• Lost Hearts
• The Mezzotint
• The Ash Tree
• Number 13
• Count Magnus
• "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"
• The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
• A School Story
• The Rose Garden
• The Tractate Middoth
• Casting the Runes

These are not the kind of ghost stories you might know from contemporary writers. These are turn of the century, uncanny ghost stories. You might notice that I love to use the word uncanny, this is because it's been imprinted in my brain by my professors. 

These stories are not gory, but they are scary it their own way. The first thing to note is that it's always told by someone who has heard or read this story somewhere. The main person in the story will never actually tell you the story. This means that you don't know how it will end. The protagonist could end up dead or alive at the end of the tale. Also it means that we don't get the full information, because it reaches us through hear-say. The effect of that is that it becomes "realistic" in that someone could have actually experienced the circumstances; they are all stories from the past. 

As I said when I had read The Three Musketeers the knowledge I had acquired in university has kind of seeped away; I have to strain myself to read these books. It's good practice do and I do really miss discussing these books with my professor.