'Tis the Season = M.R. James

Collected Stories lives on my bedside cabinet but Xmas = M.R. James time for real. Read "Casting the Runes" again the other night cos it's pleasant enough to not kick the nightmares in i.e. at least it ends well. That thing he wrote for the Boy Scouts is maybe the wickedest piece of child-scaring I've ever read.

I know there's some James love on this board, let's try and work out why he's the best Christmas writer ever.

Right, you've inspired me to get out my collections--will report back!

The Complete Stories is almost certainly my most revisited book but it mysteriously seems to go missing all the time. Like right now damnit.

Not been updated for ages, and not the most accessible of sites, but if you love MRJ, you need to know about this:

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html

He always makes me want to chase up people like Arthur Machen and I think this is partly some proto Wicker Man "british isles is evil and old" imaginary anti-nostalgia but I have never read a writer who can properly compete.

The White People by Machen is definitely worth a read.

Online here: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/whtpeopl.htm

Much more dense and trippy than James. Some elucidation here: http://www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/rbadac-numinous.html

I read some Machen on the net one time but I need proper fo' real books.

BBC sussed this shit cos they always do James adaptations over the christmas-tide. I suppose it ties into hiding in our mead-halls over the winter solstice atavism too.

Hard to pick a favourite James story but the Scouts one is definitely one of the darkest and most horrible.

Hard to look at an unmown summer field without feeling it, too.

'Rats' is a really intense shocker. 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook' and 'Count Magnus' also jump to mind.

Doesn't seem to be online, but there is an occasionally reprinted chapbook called "The James Gang", listing MRJ influenced authors of ghost stories. From memory: H.R. Wakefield, E.F. Benson. L.T.C Rolt, A.N.L. Munby, Andrew Caldecott and so on . .

Benson is a guy who always cropped up in childhood ghost compilations and I should maybe try and track down his collected ghost stories next.

Wordsworth do a cheap (3-quid) omnibus of the ghost stories of Benson and his brother.

E F Benson lived in Lamb House in Rye after the death of Henry James in 1915... my Wordsworth collection of Henry James' supernatural stories sits right next to my Wordsworth collection of M R James' supernatural stories...SPOOKY

Getting back to M.R. James, he was an academic expert on the biblical apocrypha, and the medieval literature around it, knew a lot about medieval ideas on demonology and witchcraft and seems to have been at least open to the idea that some of it was true. This certainly gives his stuff its antiquarian depth, and must have something to do with its psychological edge.

There's a good essay by someone called Jacqueline Simpson in Folklore about the origins (particularly Scandinavian) of his ghosts, the rules that they obey.

Here we go -

"The Rules of Folklore" in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James

Jacqueline Simpson
Folklore, Vol. 108, (1997), pp. 9-18

Interestingly, the device he used in Casting the Runes (of the unwitting acceptance of a message resulting in death unless it can be passed on to another unsuspecting victim - later used in, amongst others, the various Ringu/Ring films) Simpson claims is completely original.

Casting the Runes also has that memorable image of the insects crawling out of the slide projection screen at a children's party - possibly a precursor to that brilliant and startling moment in the Ring films.

That's fascinating - he puts that over so convincingly that I just assumed it was a real tradition. Be interested to know if the writer of Ringu was referencing either the James story or the Night of the Demon movie.

The whole slide projection sequence in "Casting the Runes" is vivid and memorable. If anything the "happy" ending undermines the horror a little bit.

I'm sure that there are folkloric precursors to the cursed message, even if James invented the specifics himself. The Black Spot in Treasure Island is kind of an influence I think. Not to take anything away from James himself tho.

I think the Black Spot (god how that gave me nightmares as a child - that and Blind Pew) was just a signal, like a white feather, that some sort of (man made) retribution or communal judgement was at hand, but yes, certainly I'm sure cursed objects, papers etc are a strong element of lots of folk beliefs - I suspect that she was referring to either the unwitting nature of the person receiving the message, or the element where if it gets passed on, the curse moves entirely over to the other person, possibly both - as you say, the specifics.

I've read (nowhere particularly authoritative I don't think) that Ringu was influenced by Casting the Runes, but at the time I read that, I felt that was perhaps a little tenuous, I'm not really sure now, but not knowing anything about the genesis of the film, am only really going on instinct.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_v108/ai_20438230/?tag=content;col1

Here's a link to that Jacqueline Simpson article by the way.

Thanks!

xpost: I wouldn't be one bit surprised if Night of the Demon (the film of Casting the Runes) is well-known and respected in Japan. I don't know if MRJ's stories are, but it would be nice to make the connection.

I have a vague recollection that Ringu was based on some kind of actual school playground urban legend, but I could be wrong.

A big problem I have with lots of non-James stuff is the characters often explicitly hypothesise about the nature of the hauntings, go on about the spiritual dimension, speculate about mechanisms for passing from one side to the other, etc etc. It always comes across as thoroughly bogus and destroys any suspension of disbelief. I can't recall James ever doing this, his horrors just are, and you accept them thoroughly.

Same point made in the article above, I discover.

A collection of James' own pieces on the history and construction of ghost stories:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/james/mr/collect/appendix.html

i only learnt today his first name is montague

James' ghosts and demons are almost never communicable with, which is another point in their favour. They're almost always implacable forces of evil once they've been disturbed, with no chance for the victim to reason with them. At best, you can dodge them or put them onto somebody else's trail.

Also they're generally real physical things - revenants and demons - rather than wispy spooks and spectres. Not that there aren't scary stories with spooks and spectres, but James' ghoulies seem to generate a more palpable fear.

Yeah as in they will mess you up for real so shutting your eyes going "not scared not scared" won't cut it. As real things I guess they are also that much more tied to their landscape too, hence landscape = fear.

This stuff was all very real to him, that's what makes it so intense. His ghosts are as real as his haunted houses - he would have been able to tell you all about their architecture - and as solid as the old-testament universe that he saw behind the Edwardian world he lived in.

44 sleeps till christmas a website just told me! fuck off. coincidentally i am reading m r james for the first time and huh.

well that made me very efficiently spooked when i was walking around the house in the dark last night but i don't really know how else i felt about it

+enjoyed the running jokes about golf
+favourite 'the mezzotint' = the cambridge types in it displaying utter aesthetic detachment at the supernatural stuff, just kinda 'huh, that ghoul totally stole a kid ... no biggie', like the inverse of Standard Lovecraft Emotion
+don't know how much of this stuff was as ... familiar? not predictable exactly ... at the head of the last century
+like the one with the ward of the guy who's an expert on sacrificial rituals and whose previous wards have vanished
+and he explains that afterwards!! in case you didn't figure it out!!
+whereas 'whistle and i'll come to you, my lad', there's a foregrounded MYSTERIOUS INSCRIPTION which he never explains!!
+contrast to the ones in canon alberic's treasure, which are explained and overexplained. is 'the gold-bug' the (modern) origin of this type of story?
+'room 13' or 'number 13' a fine display of the 'the space in the room is wrong' thing, which is probably my favourite horror topos or trope of all time

Mezzotint = owner is freaked out but god help him he has to watch = maybe archivist's reaction to the unstoppable brutality of the past

inscription in Oh Whistle doesn't feel untranslatable but again the finder's "pooh pooh"ing draws him in
room 13 is straight Poe but Poe is ugly at this kind of horror of physics too, James sells you the naivety of his protagonists imo

I presume you've all googled the inscription.

Interesting display of (non-scholarly) detachment in "Rats".

sorry yeah i think i cd read the inscription anyway when i was undrunk

anyho the place is the thing, imagine how horrible non-rural UK ghost writing mostly cd be

the mezzotint guy didn't seem that freaked out by it. he was willing to give that it was enough of a suspension of normal circumstances that his scout could use his chair, that was the limit.

i enjoyed the presence in a couple of cases of references to psychical-research types at the periphery of the story, curious what it would do to the logic of these fictions if they'd moved any more central

basically after three stories i was thinking 'must get the collected stories as soon as possible' and after i finished the book i thought 'maybe i will get the collected stories one day when i see a copy'

Is there a "best place to start" or just dive in with any book/edition?

There are collected stories freely downloadable. Usually collections are largely chronological, it works well because a lot of his classics are in the first batch of stories but I think he gets richer and more interesting in some ways later on

cosine this

the penguin 'count magnus and other ghost stories' is his first two collections with no omissions and some extra stuff and s.t. joshi's notes are only a little bit annoying

+don't know how much of this stuff was as ... familiar? not predictable exactly ... at the head of the last century
+like the one with the ward of the guy who's an expert on sacrificial rituals and whose previous wards have vanished
+and he explains that afterwards!! in case you didn't figure it out!!

apparently i have a long history of hating on 'lost hearts'

weird note: i have a strong memory of reading that particular copy of 'ghost stories of an antiquary' in the house i grew up in ... which on the evidence of this thread never happened, as my parents had left long before the date i say i'm reading it for the first time ~

There are collected stories freely downloadable

MRJ might be the only author where I have a sudden luddite desire to claim that there's no substitute for reading him on paper. There is or was a cheapo wordsworth classics edition of the complete ghost stories, which has all but three.

There's a run of stories towards the end that up till now have never left any impression on my memory - An Episode of Cathedral History, The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance, Two Doctors, The Haunted Dolls' House, The Uncommon Prayer-Book. Just reread them all and I would need some convincing that this isn't the weakest set of the bunch.

An Episode of Cathedral History: this is good and important (= i have a *theory* abt it which i am waiting to deploy on freaky trigger).

All the others have one perfectly formed memorably nasty element but are otherwise slight (two doctors, which is largely period pastiche), formally a repeat (dolls house, as he admits), erm not un-racist (prayerbook), or technically flawed (disappearance, which i remain fond of for the punch-and-judy stuff).

caveat: i am the biggest MRJ-stan on the board and basically he did NOTHING BAD and EVERYTHING IS GOOD shut up

also ledge is clearly setting djh up for some kind of sacristan-style business with his "read it in an actual book"

one reason i like the copy i've downloaded is it collects everything and has James's introductions to the original published volumes.

There is or was a cheapo wordsworth classics edition of the complete ghost stories, which has all but three.

that's collected not complete, which sounds less oxymoronish. it has this cover, which is a perfect evocation of the jamesian atmosphere, if not quite enough to inspire the terror of the sacristan:

http://www.fineartprintsondemand.com/artists/grimshaw/moonlight_walk-400.jpg

i have a *theory* abt it which i am waiting to deploy on freaky trigger

only five others to go first eh

wellS cathedral

Abbot Thomas is where I poached my current dn from but I'm not a big fan of James's slurpy tentacle monsters

i read a commentary -- and afterwards saw an illustration -- which argued that the abbot thomas creeper is actually another huge leathery spider (as the was famously averse to same) but what he actually writes allows you to inject yr own best fear i guess

My latest reread has also made me think that Im not as creeped out by your classic skeleton things as MRJ wants me to be

There are a LOT of skeleton things

now I want to make an m.r. james top trumps set.

Revisiting mark's post from yesterday now I'm a bit soberer and my main thought is whatever happened to petit fours?

well everyone in the scene said they'd have slab cake so i guess they were already on the way out

that slab cake looked great tbf

it's what's lurking behind the slab you have to worry about

what's wittgenstein's favourite cake?

slab!

This year's bbc ghost story for christmas appears to be

"Kit Harington and Freddie Fox star in Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No.249."

( https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/bbc-christmas-whats-on-tv-iplayer-2023 )

― koogs, Wednesday, 6 December 2023 12:42 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

haunting my tv right now i dont know if theres any legal basis for gatiss to be prevented from working but morally surely there's something that can be done

If I speak I will be in trouble

jesus i've seen a couple of reviews and they must've been on the Baileys early

If you want to experience the absolute nadir of Gatiss/Moffat, the play Unfriend - about SOCIAL MEDIA and TRUMP and LIBERAL HIPOCRISY - is a truly cursed production (walked out during the interval).

lot 249 is a story i was scared witless by as a kid when i read it at school along with all the other down-canon conan doyles (he wrote several good horror stories, my ten-yr-old self advises that you skip the brigadier gerard books tho)

i have no doubt gatiss will wreck it and will subscribe to deems's problematic newsletter

lol I enjoyed Brigadier Gerard!

also worth tracking down his autobio where, at one point, he visits Australian troops in wwi and lectures them for being too boastful when after all they were only there to serve the British Empire

lol early keano eh

only got round to reading some james last night - a neighbour's landmark and rats, because they're short and it was late. I thought, it's only words and surely familiarity has dulled any of their power to scare. but I was not a little nervous after turning out the light. but I am a big wuss.

stoked for the gatiss badness.

i think this doesn't count as spoilers: the opening scene is some dialogue that i assume is lifted straight from Conan Doyle and the actors readings felt a bit off and i thought "ah well at least they're going for a sense of period"

two minutes later the phrase "colour me surprised" appeared out of nowhere

it was downhill from there

watched "night of the demon" on friday courtesy my sister's BF's collection

superb combo of tourneur for spooky mis-en-scene in various diversity plus niall macginnis as karswell (everyone else might as well be bit parts but this doesn't matter) (exception: maurice denham, tho his part is over in moments)

• excellent deployment of "scary clown" trope
• the damaged local yokel whose hypno-testimony saves the good guys is named "rand hobart" lol (name is highly unjamesian; character is not his) (there's an oddly similar scene in quatermass and the pit two years later)
• the scene where holden encounters and is menaced by the rest of the farming family hobart is nevertheless tremendous
• there are no runes on stonehenge but #whocare
• the demon revealed remains adorable

That the demon is totally un-Jamesian goes without saying but that death scene is kind of horrific for 1957?

(Karswell's screams awoke traumatic memories of some of the deaths in the black and white Tarzan episodes that used to be in the 6 o'clock slot on, I think, BBC2.)

love the demon. such a good boy!

The Gatiss documentary is on BBC4 right now yay the darkness is encroaching

followed by two non-MR short stories, which is an odd choice (maybe talking pictures have the rights currently, they showed the usual ones at Christmas)

how was the doc?

a repeat. we've complained about it before, i'm sure

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03n2rnc/mr-james-ghost-writer

It's alright, the biographical stuff about Monty is good, Gatiss doesn't impose a grand theory on him, the clips of the 70s TV adaptations are fine, the chat about the TV adaptations is pretty dull. The lad playing Monty is a bit much maybe

I picked up a DVD of all of them, pre-Gatiss, this week. Has always been quite expensive but found it for about £20. Be nice watching them all free of YouTube.

I also found, after some digging, an interview with Gatiss that confirms he's doing one this year.

https://worldscreen.com/tvdrama/mark-gatiss-talks-the-ghost-stories-franchise/

His description here sounds a bit like E Nesbit - Man Sized In Marble, but we shall see. Her horror stories are amazing, would be brilliant for this series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ghost_Story_for_Christmas

Wikipedia confirms it is! I wish this wasn't Gatiss but it still should be great.

In her final days, E. Nesbit (whose Man-sized in Marble this drama is adapted from) recounts the chilling tale of newlywed Victorians Jack and Laura. As they settle into a small cottage in a quiet village, they find their idyll overshadowed by the superstitious warnings of their housekeeper, regaling the legend of the two marble tomb effigies who are said to rise one night each year. Jack dismisses the story as folklore ramblings. But as the fateful night draws near, he makes a terrifying discovery. Back at the cottage, Laura is all alone...

i'm sure i've read that one tho not for a long time. i remember it being a good one

yeah i've never really read a bad one of hers. some of them are absolutely terrifying. i was rereading some of her stuff this weekend just gone... the shadow is the one i always think about.

OK I'll definitely try those, I've only read her children's stories but the ugly-wugglies in the enchanted castle are truly creepy.

only to echo LG: e nesbit horror stories are fantastic. but i really can’t abide gatiss’ brightly lit and jaunty approach. i’m sure it might work in some hands but he just comes across as relentlessly not-good-enough.

i mean this is rich - he’s clearly a multi-talented, interested and energetic contributor to television and his enthusiasms. but i do just mean i find it all not good enough, not quite getting at the mystery.

yeah i feel like he is gonna have that kinda nudge winky feeling he's had so far and sort of ruin the vibe a bit.

whereas the only funny thing about e nesbit's stories is how relentlessly bleak they are.

i mean i definitely laugh a little bit when the story begins with 'they talk about death being cold. it’s life that’s the cold thing' or whatever.

follow https://bsky.app/profile/onetrueposter.bsky.social for a bracket tournament to discover the greatest m.r. james ghost story.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gmdt/episodes/guide

^ repeats of Ghost Stories For Christmas (not all MR James. and is that the new one? Woman of Stone)

not on that list is

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09l566n/episodes/guide

^ repeats of 3x Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas

Several of the old BBC adaptations are streaming on Shudder this month.

2025 Christmas ghost story is The Room In The Tower (not one i know)

https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2025/a-ghost-story-for-christmas-the-room-in-the-tower

(and not MR James but...)

I have read it before, just read it again. The build up is good, it should give shivers to anyone who's ever had a nightmare of a particular type. The climax is ok, they'll probably do it in a way that's been done many times before on film (The Woman in Black, The Ring...). The very end is silly and leaves half a dozen things in need of explanation - unlike with James there's no rhyme or reason behind any of it.

it would be good to see more Benson adaptations but, well, Gatiss

This Halloween Season Spooky Week I learned that there are multiple films based on "Casting the Runes."

oh yeah, especially when you count the looser ones like Drag Me to Hell

In fact that is exactly what I was counting, since it was showing at MoMI and they mentioned it in the program notes. Still have yet to see it myself.

Maybe it's only that and Night of the Demon, but it seems like there must be more.

in themselves the gatiss ones aren't awful, tho they are bad, but what's worse is he's burning through loads of great material with this shite. not sure it's picking up many new fans either and so a decent chance of murdering ghost story for xmas for good. that would be closer to real horror than his weirdly quirky adaptations.

this story feels a really good one but the tone is just so middling. it's weird as he obv loves all this stuff but his actual feel for it just feels completely wrong to me.

Maybe it's only that and Night of the Demon, but it seems like there must be more.

There's also Lawrence Gordon Clark's Casting the Runes.

--

I've probably said this before but I think a couple of the Gatiss ones are actually good (I really rate The Dead Room in particular), but most of them are just very bland and unscary. I'm not really on the hater train, more just 'Gatiss sceptical', and I really wish they'd give someone else a go. However, he probably is the only person who has both the passion for it and the name recognition to get the BBC to sign off on continuing.

If you want an adaptation that shows you what Ghost Stories for Christmas COULD be, I suggest checking out Kier-La Janisse's The Occupant of the Room, which showed at this year's Mayhem Festival and was prob my highlight of the whole thing.

I wondered about the reason for the framing, then thought Mrs Stone was a pretty rubbish revenant for allowing herself to get knocked down with one blow like a cheap scarecrow. So the ending was satisfying on both those counts. I don't care if it was corny or unsubtle, the original ending is weak and needed something more. The whole story still lacks a raison d'etre though.

caught up with lot 249 at the same time as the room in the tower (plus rewatched the one with the stone knights)

i kind of hate bagging on gatisss-- long passed time for my challopsy ilx heel turn -- but theyre all bad and so is he 😔👎🏽😑