Pleasing terror

I don’t really believe in ghosts, but have always loved ghost stories. That’s because I do believe in the power of stories to disturb and unsettle, even the most firmly rational mind. And judging by the audience figures for the theatre show “Ghost Stories” I’m not alone in the desire to be scared witless, by something I don’t believe in!

Nowadays, it’s easy for a play or film that sets out to frighten its audience – it can always rely on visual effects, and that old trick of simply making you jump.

For me personally, I like to sometimes forget what I’ve seen; whether in CGI, make-up or every monster imaginable, and go back in time, to the books of Montague Rhodes James.

The pleasure in reading his books is that they fill our nervous imaginations, at first welcoming with ease into his characters world. But then they bring trouble on themselves by innocent actions – a little too curious, examining an old manuscript or by picking up a harmless object on the beach.  As the stories unfold you begin to realise the unpleasantness that is developing around the victim. You see them slowly becoming trapped in horrific and ghostly situations from which there is no escape!

He does the literally equivalent of covering our eyes at the moment of horror – a few words dropped casually; a face like crumpled linen, a creature made of hair, a footprint with the bones visible. We desperately want to look, but even more desperately, we don’t want to ‘see’. We’re like the observers in “The Mezzotint” – “profoundly thankful that they could see no more”!

So for those of you who like your “flesh to creep”, there is nothing better than reading these stories; with just the sound of a ticking clock, you’ll be taken back to the time they were written, the times of long train journeys and remote landscapes.

 

Ask anyone what they consider to be the most horrible moment in M.R. James’ fiction, and the chances are they will come up with the passage in “Casting the Runes” – in which, waking in the dark Mr Dunning puts his hand under the pillow to get his watch and;

“What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth and with hair about it, and he declares not the mouth of a human being.”

On the face of it, that mouth should be no more frightening than the false teeth in the glass on the bedside table. The ghostly mouth, doesn’t bite or even lick the hand, it’s just there and it shouldn’t be – it stops the heart!

And like most, I have my favourite stories one of which is  “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”. It takes the dull pass time of a man looking through a collection of documents, to pie.ce together the death of an Archdeacon and finds a tale of murderous ambition!

Our guilty victim is increasingly troubled and ‘haunted’ from beyond the grave by a black cat and that whispering voice;

“The whispering in my house was more persistent tonight. I seemed not to be rid of it in my room. I have not noticed this before. A nervous man, which I am not, and hope I am not becoming, would have been much annoyed, if not alarmed, by it. The cat was on the stairs tonight. I think it sits there always……. There is no kitchen cat.”

You can feel his ghosts gather around you; from the 2 cloaked figures waiting expectantly at the crossroads in “Count Magnus” , the engraving of an old manor house coming to life in “The Mezzotint” and a man haunted through his dreams from “O Whistle & I’ll Come to you My Lad”

His memorable images conjure the night terrors of child-hood, the glimpsed figure on the lonely beach and that voice that whispers in our ear on the dark stairs. It’s unsettling the effect his books produce, reminding us, we don’t really know what populates the dark – beyond the circle of our candlelight!

Afterwards, you will be glad to constantly remind yourself, that this is in fact “just a story”. But you will never forget any of his writing, or find anything more English or disturbing as his “ghostly tales”

So as you walk down a deserted beach, or even a lonely stretch of road, it will never feel quite the same again – you have M.R. James to thank for that!