Casting the Runes: And Other Ghost Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.90 (866 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0195151178 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-12-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A must read for the true-blue aficionado. James is best known now for his supernatural stories, regarded by many as being among the best ever written."--Library Journal
An inexplicably dreadful edition A Customer Beware! If you love James or desire to discover him, this new edition of OUP's anthology is not the way to go. A previous and superb OUP edition was edited and annotated by Michael Cox. His fascinating comments are cued by asterisks that are liberally sprinkled throughout the text. In the current version, all the annotations are gone--but the asterisks remain! One can imagine how many readers must be scratching their heads over them. In place of Cox's excellent work, there is an innane introduction by the fashionable novelist Michael Chabon, wh. One of the great voices in horror First, about M.R. James:He is excellent! He is one of the best, most underappreciated voices in horror. Lovecraft admired him. His stories, though old, are quite scary. Also, they are very well written. As Chabon points out in his intro, Poe and Lovecraft weren't the best literary stylists. Most people cite "Oh, Whistle" as James's best story, but I think I'll vote for "Count Magnus." Certainly all of them are good. More than that, they are REQUIRED reading for anyone who wants to have a basic understanding of horror literature. It is also a he. Great stories---bargain basement , shoddy Edition. AVOID Dark Mechanicus JSG Oxford University Press has committed an outrage---a violation!---and the publishers should be ashamed of themselves. Montague Rhodes James (1865-1936) is, for me, the Grand Master of the Terrifying Tale, and for those not acquainted with his works---well, I envy you the chilling delight of meeting up with James's menacing, atmospheric prose for the first time. Read the tales and relish their keen sense of terror, which belies the avuncular, scholarly style and antiquarian sensibilities in which James was so well-versed.That said, it's a shame
M.R. James was one of the most accomplished scholars of his generation, a brilliant, internationally known authority on early Christian manuscripts. He was in turn a Fellow, Dean, and Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, and then finally the Provost of Eton, where he died a much-loved and revered figure in 1936. Michael Chabon is
But what these tales are really about, writes Chabon, "is ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of 'reality,' of all the structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from our constant nagging suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning." The tales in Casting the Runes are both chilling fun and, as Chabon concludes, "unmistakably works of art." Anyone who loves short fiction or who enjoys a good scare will find these stories an irresistible delight.. Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"--most of the early short story writers wrote ghost stories as a matter of course. They are set in the leisurely, late-Victorian, middle-class world of country houses, seaside inns, out-of-the-way railway stations, and cathedral closes, where gentlemen of independent means and antiquarian tastes suddenly find themselves confronted by terrifying agents of supernatural malice. And the best writer of ghost stories, the acknowledged master, was M.R. In Casting the Runes, we h