M. R. James

Montague Rhodes James OM (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936) was an English biblical scholar, medievalist, palaeographer and bibliographer, but is best remembered for his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and other works of supernatural fiction.

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Quotes

I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.
- "Count Magnus", from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904); The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, 1947) p. 111.

"There was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill, and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning…He looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."
- "A School Story", from More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, 1947) p. 188.

A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!"
- Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); cited from Michael Cox (ed.) Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 337-8.

Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.
- "Some Remarks on Ghost Stories", in The Bookman, December 1929; cited from Michael Cox M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 150.

At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognised authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.
- H. P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', The Recluse, No. 1 (1927), p. 56

Sly humorous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen.
- H. P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', The Recluse, No. 1 (1927), p. 57

James is regularly cited as a – or the – founder of the ‘tradition’ of English ghost stories. It is commonplace to then wryly point out that James’s ghosts are in fact often not ghosts, but inhuman ‘demons’ of one sort or another.
- China Miéville, "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire". Collapse IV, May 2008. Quoted in James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. Cham : Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2019 (p.21)

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James. I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm frightened of them. They don't come any scarier than in these superb examples of the classic English ghost story.
- Philip Pullman, 'My essential reading list', The Times Books (30 August 2008), p. 6

There are some authors one wished one had never read in order to have the joy of reading them for the first time. For me, M. R. James is one of these.
- Ruth Rendell, "Introduction" to A Warning to the Curious: The Ghost Stories of M. R. James, London, Hutchinson, 1987 (p.iv)