A friend recommended Wakefield as being in the same class as M.R. James. My own feeling is that his stories are competently done but they lack the antiquarian touches I enjoy in James, and they are rarely as terrifying. They generally involve ordinary middle class English people of the 1920s (when they were probably written), usually living in ordinary homes, apartment, and offices (in one case an artist's studio) where something unpleasant(murder, suicide) has happened in the fairly recent past, living immaterial traces behind --not necessarily supernatural in the strict sense --some of his characters advocate Doyle's theory that events leave a kind of "recording" in the atmosphere where they occur, which plays out over and over without have a conscious spirit behind it. On the other hand, there s one story of two mountain (or at least hill) climbers who encounter a creature that only manifests when there is snow on the ground around a certain cairn. That one remains unexplained.Another involves a car in which an American gangster coupe were bumped off. I believe I have read a more recent story which handles the same idea more smoothly, with only one victim. I don;t know if the other writer (whose name I don't remember) was influenced by Wakefield or it was an independent invention. In a fair number of cases, the people who have these encounters are frightened but survive, which I prefer to the others in which they die horribly. Sometimes there is a victim of vengeance from beyond the grave who deserves the punishment, but the reader is not usually in that person;s mind, which makes it more bearable. ( )