Adult fiction; ghost stories. These were OK stories--pretty spooky and suspenseful, but not something I was willing to wade through at the time. ( )

I really liked these stories, though James's prose is sometimes impenetrable. Also, his stories all have the same format: "Oh, here are some books James is interested in real life, let's have the protagonist wander around trying to find them. Oh, here's a working-class guy offended by some slight from an academic. Oh, a ghost. Oh, the end." ( )

This was a fun little read. After The Lair of the White Worm it was a little bit of fluff to soothe the mind and conjure up demons and curses, oh my. ( )

Montague Rhodes James is one of the greatest practitioners of the classic ghost story. In his stories, members of the British leisure class of his own period -- often scholars like the professor himself -- encounter the uncanny. Many of the stories were written to be read to his college at Christmastime in the English custom.

As far as the story selection goes, this contains James' most famous works, including the eponymous story, "Count Magnus," "A Warning to the Curious," and "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad." Of course, James wrote so few stories that it would be hard not to include his major ones in a compilation of this length. At the end the editor presents a group of essays and selections of essays by James on his conception of the ghost story. These explain some of his successes, though his theorizing isn't very deep.

The book was edited, with an introduction and notes by Michael Cox. Cox would be in the position to do edit such a volume, since he wrote a biography of James. Nevertheless, the annotations in particular aren't what I'd have liked to see. Each end note begins with the publication history and disposition of the original manuscript of the story, which is useful to the scholar but not of interest to the general reader. More than that, the foot notes often leave something to be desired. Cox's note on the Black Pilgrimage, for example, really has nothing to do with what James is describing. The title of "A Neighbour's Landmark" no doubt can be found in the Book of Common Prayer, as Cox notes, but both texts take it from Deuteronomy 19:14 and 27:17 as well as Proverbs 22:28. Cox is completely silent on liturgical cursing, which actually existed and is the basis of "The Uncommon Prayer-book."

In many ways it's unfair, though. To annotate James' stories one needs to know what James knew. In addition to being well read in literature, James was a medievalist, and published everything from manuscripts he discovered mouldering in old churches to what was for decades the most authoritative edition of the New Testament apocrypha. Cox doesn't cite secondary literature at all, perhaps because there wasn't any. I understand this has now been corrected with Patrick J. Murphy's Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M.R. James. I also learned recently that, a decade after Cox's book, S. T. Joshi and Penguin Classics published a two-volume Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James with annotations. I'll most likely read this (at least piecemeal, reading the stories I haven't read yet), though I'm sure it will tell more about the weird tales Joshi knows and not about the medieval studies he probably doesn't.

Discovering the classic port-and-leather-armchair ghost stories of M.R. James is like first reading "Dune" or "The Lord of the Rings." The tremendous possibilities of an entire genre suddenly open up to you, and you end up reading dozens of similar books but only rarely find that original thrill-so inevitably you come full circle, content to read (over and over) "Oh Whistle," "Number 13," and "A Warning to the Curious." And the stories never lose their magic and menace. - Adam