Creating a sense of terror through words on the printed page is a curious idea. In one sense, there’s no reason why a pattern of symbols on the page should be able to stimulate an emotion- but then if that were truly the case, nobody would write or read fiction for pleasure. The written word can, of course, evoke emotions of all kinds, but fear is an interesting one because it’s so completely irrational that printed words should create that sense of fear in the reader. I’m writing this piece about M.R. James having gone back to his stories after the BBC4 repeats over Christmas; while the series of 1970s adaptations were beautifully photographed and carefully adapted, the stories adapted were perhaps a handful of James’s best and the absence of ‘The Ash Tree’ and ‘Lost Hearts’ was remarked upon.

James was an academic by profession, and many of his stories take place in academic or monastic settings with seekers after truth at their centre. Academics and archaeologists abound, and this gives many of the stories a deliberately antiquarian air; ‘Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You’ and ‘A Warning To The Curious’ both depict the consequences of archaeological discoveries unearthing a long-forgotten past, and the forces which are awakened. James’s background gave him a talent for filling his stories with plausible details, such as fictitious volumes of occult lore and falsified legends which place the tales in context. Although in the most part contemporary to within a few decades of the date of writing, the stories are set in a universe where the injustices and cruelties of the past can be repaid in the same coin centuries later. Time and again, those who seek to over-reach the bounds of what human beings are meant to know are punished in a variety of terrible ways. The only safe course of action in James’s universe is to accept limitations and traditions as being there to protect humanity from the dark and dangerous creatures on the fringes of existence and not to strive for knowledge or riches beyond that which it is allotted to us to have.

In some ways, it’s a mistake to describe James’s output as ghost stories, as the creatures in many of them are not what we would consider ghosts as such. Many of them are mysterious beings of the night somewhere between animal and human intelligence and unidentifiable as a specific person, such as the "guardian" in ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ or the beasts in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’. Few are identifiable as named individuals. For the most part, an M.R. James ghost is a faceless, nameless presence given a visible form, and this is where James begins to reflect the fears of the early twentieth century in which he wrote, as he taps into the deep fear in all of us of loss of identity. In James’s universe, personality does not survive death, and what comes back is more like an elemental spirit than the essence of an individual. There’s an undercurrent of terror in something like the spirit in ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ which isn’t easily explained; it’s all tension and mystery, and even the final appearance of the spirit asks more questions than it answers, as no explanation of the ghost is given or offered. It is simply a vindictive presence woken by the act of unearthing and blowing an ancient whistle of unexplained origin. At the root, I believe, is the idea of dark and impersonal forces hovering somewhere in the background, beyond our experience and understanding, with no conception of reason or pity.