Book description
To mark the publication of Stop What You're Doing and Read
This!, a collection of essays celebrating reading, Vintage
Classics are releasing 12 limited edition themed ebook 'bundles', to
tempt readers to discover and rediscover great books.
M. R. JAMES' GHOST STORIES
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY RUTH RENDELL
M. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on
Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a
genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a
recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then
unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a
lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window - ordinary things take on
more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense.
DRACULA
'The door is shut, and the chains rattle; there is a grinding of
the key in the lock; I hear the creaking of lock and bolt...I shall
not remain alone with them. I may find a way from this dreadful
place, away from this cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the
devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!'
Young lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania on
business for a mysterious Count. Months later in England, beautiful
Lucy Westenra falls ill and dies, inexplicably, as if from a severe
loss of blood. Lucy's friends, including Jonathan's fiancée Mina and
the intrepid doctor Van Helsing, must begin a desperate battle against
a powerful, ancient evil, in Bram Stoker's definitive gothic tale.
Montague Rhodes James was born on 1 August 1862 near Bury St
Edmunds, and he spent long periods of his later life in Suffolk, which
provided the setting for many of his ghost stories. He studied at Eton
and Kings College, Cambridge, where he was eventually elected Fellow,
and then made Provost in 1905. In 1918 he became Provost of Eton. He
was a renowed medievalist and biblical scholar, and published works on
palaeography, antiquarianism, bibliography and history and guides to
Suffolk and Norfolk, as well as editing a collection of ghost stories
by Sheridan Le Fanu. However, he remains best known for his own ghost
stories, which were published in several collections, including
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), A Thin Ghost and Other
Stories (1919), A Warning to the Curious (1925) and a
collected edition in 1931. M. R. James never married and died on 12
June 1936.
Abraham Stoker was born in Dublin on 8 November 1847. He
graduated in Mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin in 1867 and then
worked as a civil servant. In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe. He
later moved to London and became business manager of his friend Henry
Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He wrote several sensational novels including
novels The Snake's Pass (1890), Dracula (1897), The Jewel of Seven
Stars (1903), and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). Bram Stoker died
on 20 April 1912.
