M.R. James and the Craft of Fear
Learn the subtleties of writing terror from a master of the scary ghost story
The BBC’s 1973 adaptation of Lost Hearts, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark
The ghost stories of Etonian scholar Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) are about as perfect in terms of structure and technique as it’s possible to get. With the thirty-three terror tales James penned for his own amusement, including classics such as Casting the Runes and Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, he revolutionised the form. Building on innovations made by Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), James brought horror fiction out of the gothic dungeon and let it loose in the Edwardian drawing room.
In my estimation, the ghost story occupies a specific place on the spectrum of horror storytelling. Unlike the gorgeous gorefests of a Clive Barker or a Poppy Z. Brite, writers of grand guignol spectacle whose gothic ideas are wrought in a Jackson Pollock of flesh and blood, the ghost story gets you when you’re not looking.
Occupying the opposite end of the horror-o-meter where gore and monsters are rarely on show, the ghost story is an altogether subtler mode and demands a certain mastery. The writer must know how to creep up on readers using whispers and tact, techniques of which M.R. James is one of the greatest teachers there is.
A horror connoisseur (i.e. nerd), James read and studied widely. He was particularly admiring of Dickens’ The Signalman (1866), Le Fanu’s The Watcher (1847, revised as The Familiar in 1872) and Margaret Oliphant’s The Open Door (1881).
As exacting of his own techniques as he was of the genre itself, James outlined his approach to writing in a 1929 essay Some Remarks on Ghost Stories, first published in the Christmas edition of The Bookman.
In the early days of my own self-education in writing, I was as hungry to decipher ‘the rules’ as any other rookie. So I pounced on James’s essay the moment I found it and several passages have certainly stuck with me over the years when writing my own horror stories…