Author(s): Ruth Rendell (Introduction by); M. R. James

Fiction

Malignant forces and supernatural visitors haunt this selection of superbly spooky tales. M. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a doll's house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window -- ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense.