All The Rage: M. R. James
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
The August 2008 edition of All The Rage has, as ever, a theme: ‘monsters’. Among the high-quality content (well, among the content, anyway) addressing that theme is my own ‘Monty’s Monsters’, an essay which looks at a figure who has been of interest to me for many years - the scholar, antiquary and writer of ghost stories M. R. James (1862-1936).
The appearances of his monsters are sudden, dramatic, and fleeting; they are glimpsed briefly and are gone, leaving a powerful after-image for the imagination to work upon. The reader, like the characters in the stories, is left not knowing quite what the thing that passed before them was, but retaining a vivid and dreadful impression of horror.
The point about James’s supernatural entities is that they often are not really ghosts at all but rather physical, fleshly and substantial monsters, demons from the margins of a medieval manuscript … find out more in the August 2008 edition (PDF) of All The Rage.
