Audiobook · read by volunteers
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
M. R. James (1862–1936)
Read by Peter Yearsley · 16 chapters · 10 h 06
About the book
A scholar buys a mysterious print in an antiquarian's shop, and the image on it begins to change. A traveller buys an old scrapbook in a cathedral town and wakes something that has been waiting for centuries. A boy at a country house has strange dreams about the fate of others who lived there. These are the settings of M. R. James, who wrote his ghost stories to be read aloud on Christmas Eve, in quiet English countryside and ancient libraries, where a studious, modest protagonist is slowly drawn into the activities of the supernatural. The horror is hinted at rather than shown, and that is why it lingers. Peter Yearsley reads the sixteen sections in just over ten hours, a classic collection of chills, ideal for a dark winter evening.
Introduction
Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a medieval scholar and Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and later of Eton. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud, in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales, reading them to friends and colleagues. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published in 1904 and was his first collection, followed in 1911 by a second, More Ghost Stories.
His 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, and the stories rely on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasise the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusion. The collection includes Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, Lost Hearts and The Mezzotint, which are among the most admired short ghost stories in English.
The audio recording opens with a preface. It contains 16 sections and lasts about 10.1 hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer, Peter Yearsley.
Why listen now? James's stories show how subtle suggestion can be more frightening than spectacle, and his influence on later horror writers is large. They suit the ear especially well, being written for a voice and a firelit room, and each can be heard in one sitting. These stories reward a slow, attentive hearing, ideally in the evening and in a quiet place. Their scholarly settings, with their libraries, churches and country inns, are described with the accuracy of someone who knew them well, and that realism is part of why the quiet moments of dread work so effectively.
Public domain
M. R. James died in 1936: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive