Listen to a sample
Classic Ghost Stories
- Narrator
- Stephen Critchlow
- Publisher
- Naxos AudioBooks
- Publish Date
- 1 September 2007
- Run Time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Critics Review
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The narrators in this brief anthology of spooky tales by Charles Dickens and M. R. James are men of learning and reason – sceptical if not scornful of paranormal phenomena. Which makes their accounts of inexplicable, terrifying goings-on all the more haunting, especially as both writers are masters of the telling detail and the build-up of suspense. Dickens contributes two stories: a spectral harbinger of railway disaster and the ghostly presence of the victim at a murder trial. The offerings from James, the doyen of the English spinechiller, involve a haunted engraving, a very nasty piece on rats, and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, in which an academic has a hair-raising visitation on the East Anglian coast. With its suitably unsettling music – the viola is ideal for creating a spooky atmosphere – they succeed in James’s aim of “causing readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable”.
Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times
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Details
- Author
- Charles Dickens, M.R. James
- Narrator
- Stephen Critchlow
- Duration
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Release Date
- 1 September 2007
- ISBN
- 9789629544881
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Naxos AudioBooks
- Genre
- Horror and supernatural fiction
Synopsis
These stories are designed to engender a chill in the listener which is not just due to the season. Stephen Critchlow, a characterful actor, is a collector of ghost stories and relishes putting across those slightly odd moments when things don’t just seem to follow the normal process. Charles Dickens was chilling enough in his novels – one only has to remember the entry of Magwitch in Great Expectations! – but as a writer set deeply in the Victorian era and unashamedly a lover of the melodramatic, it comes as no surprise that one of the greatest classics of the genre was The Signalman. As a medieval scholar of a later period (1862–1936) M. R. James had a very different temperament but produced a string of classic ghost stories, of which The Mezzotint is one of the best known.
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