معرفی

Introduction

He jumped and screamed and, as he did, the face of (he thing came up towards him: no eyes, no nose, no mouth. He screamed again and rushed to the door. He felt the thing touch his back and start to tear at his shirt…

fixings … things in the night, things in the house, screaming, running, staring . . . In these stories there are things that are worse than your worst dreams.

Giant black spiders living in a tree. The terrible ghost that waits outside a window. Empty clothes that walk. The strange thin woman who moves through a man’s picture. The boy with the long, dirty fingernails - and a hole in his chest. The woman who screams from the bottom of a lake. And the dry dusty old man who reads - but has no eyes!

Here are nine stories like no others you have read.

Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 in a village in Kent, in the south of England, where his father was a vicar. From an early age, he loved old books and studied history, the Bible, languages and the books of past centuries at Cambridge University. He studied, lived and worked at the University from 1882 to 1918.

He began to write ghost and horror stories after reading the stories of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. From the early 1890s, he read one of his own stories to friends at Christmas every year. His great knowledge of history gave his stories an unusual amount of detail and his ghosts seem more real, and are more frightening, than those of almost any other writer.

M.R.James died in 1936.