Books with author James M Muir

MY DEAR JANE, You remember that you were puzzled when I told you I had heard something from the owls-or if not puzzled (for I know you have some experience of these things), you were at any rate anxious to know exactly how it happened. Perhaps the time has now come for you to be told. It was really luck, and not any skill of mine, that put me in the way of it; luck, and also being ready to believe more than I could see. I have promised not to put down on paper the name of the wood where it happened: that can keep till we meet; but all the rest I can tell exactly as it came about.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

This selection of short stories from M.R. James, the master of horror stories, includes the following ghostly tales: Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book Lost Hearts The Mezzotint The Ash-tree Number 13 Count Magnus ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ The Treasure of Abbot Thomas The publisher has also included footnotes to explain unfamiliar terms and foreign-language phrases. M.R. James was the pen name of Montague Rhodes James, an academic and a novelist. James is best remembered for his ghost stories. It is said that he redefined the genre, breaking away from the earlier Gothic influences. James was provost at King’s College, part of the University of Cambridge and later provost of Eton College.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary is the title of M. R. James' first collection of ghost stories, published in 1904 (some had previously appeared in magazines). Some later editions under this title contain both the original collection and its successor, More Ghost Stories (1911), combined in one volume. Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a paleographer and medievalist scholar; Provost of King's College, Cambridge. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. By contrast to the gothic tales of predecessors, James's stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasise the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions. His tales can thus be said to have derived the subgenre of the antiquarian ghost story.