In the Library
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
M.R. James, 1904
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 45k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
The Turn of the Screw does the same thing, but through one unreliable governess instead of eight separate hauntings, tightening the dread into a single unbearable knot.
£1.99
At the Mountains of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft admired James above almost any ghost writer, and here his university scholars dig into Antarctic ruins and find, as James's antiquaries always do, that the past is still awake.
£1.99
About the book
A scholar opens a manuscript in a cathedral library and the woodcut he discovers seems to follow him afterwards, the figure in the corner of the engraving slightly altered each time he returns to the page. M.R. James, provost of King's College Cambridge and a medievalist by trade, gathered eight tales in 1904 that he had been telling to friends at Christmas in his rooms by candlelight. The settings are donnish: cathedral closes, English seaside hotels, country manors with overlooked Latin inscriptions and hand-bound Books of Hours. James let the supernatural enter through scholarship itself, the hand reaching out from a coin-hoard, the whistle that should not be blown. The tales retain their cold because the haunted are exactly the men who should know better.