Collected Ghost Stories

Hardcover, 368 pages

English language

Published March 15, 1994 by Wordsworth Editions Ltd.

ISBN:
978-1-85326-839-7
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5 stars (7 reviews)

Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, James's stories draw on the terrors of the everyday. Documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot.

10 editions

Review of 'The collected ghost stories of M. R. James' on 'Storygraph'

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I did not finish Collected Ghost Stories, I made it four stories in (just shy of 50 pages). 

I love the cadence of writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, but that's the only thing I liked about this, and that wasn't enough for me to keep going. Contemporary racist and ableist ideas about what is scary played a part a couple of the stories I read (e.g.: casually invoking “gipsies” as being blamed for a child’s disappearance but not actually responsible for it; describing an apparition as dark, sub-human, and low-intelligence based on appearance alone, etc.). 

I was disappointed by the endings of the first several stories, they end with the mystery being explained, usually by a narrator, then that’s it. No resolution, nothing. Just the explanation of the event and it ends. My understanding is that the later stories get a bit better, but for me …

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Subjects

  • Short stories
  • Horror & ghost stories