Classic Ghost Stories

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

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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