A Warning to the Curious: the ghost stories of M.R. James

by M.R. James, Ruth Rendell (Introduction)

Selected and edited by Ruth Rendell.

Contents:
Canon Alberic's Scrap-book
The Tractate Middoth
The Mezzotint
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
The Ash-tree
A Warning to the Curious
Casting the Runes
Number 13
The Uncommon Prayer Book
Count Magnus
'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'
Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Gothic, Fantasy, Ghosts

257 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Montague Rhodes James, who used the publication name M.R. James, was a noted English mediaeval scholar & provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–18) & of Eton College (1918–36). He's best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature. One of James' most important achievements was to redefine the ghost story for the new century by dispensing with many of the formal Gothic trappings of his predecessors, replacing them with more realistic contemporary settings.

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

M.R.^James

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This, the last of M.R. James' short story collections, is also his least.

Only two of its six stories are memorable. "The Doll's House" is a poor imitation of "The Mezzotint," replacing the judiciously brief glimpses of horror in the earlier story with a detailed description of ghostly doings as tedious as an Elizabethan dumb-show. "An Evening's Entertainment" is undistinguished, "The Neighbor's Landmark" begins with a few thrills but concludes without any, and "The Uncommon Prayerbook," although it introduces a captivating bibliographical rarity rooted in the Loyalist backlash against Cromwell, and ends in genuine creepiness, is nonetheless marred by snobbishness and more than a hint of anti-Semitism.

The two remaining tales, however, are very fine. "A Warning to the Curious" is James' last masterpiece, which not only uses the Jamesian theme of the "ghostly treasure guardian" to great effect, and features a stirring patriotic legend, but is brought memorably--flawlessly--to a terrifying conclusion. In spite of its excellence, however, I recall "A View from the Hill" with greater unease. This narrative concerning a necromancer's binoculars, which can view--in all their former completeness--the ruined medieval buildings of the surrounding countryside, contains a few well-chosen, nasty details that make this story forever stick in the memory.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Please note that the title story of this collection A Warning to the Curious is reviewed separately here. This is an overview of the collection.**

This is M. R. James' final collection of Ghost stories, published in 1925, although five of the six had previously been published in magazines. By now his stories had become very popular. The title story, which gives its name to the whole collection, is one of his best known works, and defines the ethos and ideology behind M. R. James' stories. Despite warnings, his characters will insist on meddling with the unknown. In particular scholars, who often tend to feature as the main character in an M. R. James story, tend to be arrogant, and underestimate the potency of mysterious ancient objects, and of the supernatural secrets they might hold and unleash. Hence, A Warning to the Curious.

The stories in this volume are:

"The Haunted Dolls' House"
"The Uncommon Prayer-Book"
"A Neighbour's Landmark"
"A View From a Hill"
"A Warning to the Curious"
"An Evening's Entertainment"

Some stories are reviewed separately.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some brilliant tales in here: The Living Doll House, the saxon crownes and the turning prayer books. All stories start as quite harmless lores but then they gain speed and become real page turners. If you like folklorists turning up secrets of the past this is the right stuff for you. Excellently written!

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost all of these stories were wordy to the point where they lose the reader. Nevertheless, the maestro had some tricks up his sleeve. Once they got unleashed, shudders followed.

[Perrilyn Pringle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty good but basic cursed object, ghost story.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC radio 4 - 15 Minute Drama:
by the master of the ghost story, M.R. James. The unearthing of an Anglo Saxon crown in the dunes unleashes supernatural forces for unfortunate medievalist Paxton.

dramatised by Neil Brand

M.R. James ..... Mark Gatiss
Paxton ..... Paul Heath
Jeffers ..... Michael Bertenshaw
Long ..... Tony Turner
Vicarl ..... Ewan Bailey
Molly ..... Saffron Coomber
Woman ..... Clare Corbett

Director: David Hunter

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads

I read A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories by M.R. James in 2022, and it felt like stepping into a candlelit library where every page creaked like an old floorboard. I had always known James by reputation—the master of the English ghost story, the don who liked his spirits to appear suddenly, with no pomp or foreshadowing, like an icy hand laid on your shoulder when you’re alone.

Reading him was less about shocks and more about atmosphere, the way unease seeps into ordinary spaces. These weren’t sprawling gothic castles or flamboyant monsters; they were beaches, churches, libraries, and lonely inns—places I thought I knew, turned uncanny with just a single detail slightly out of place.

The title story, A Warning to the Curious, left the deepest mark on me. A poor, slightly hapless amateur archaeologist stumbles upon an ancient crown buried in the Suffolk coast, and in disturbing it, he awakens something older, something patient, something that doesn’t let go. The ghost is never described in baroque detail—it is glimpsed, felt, a presence that lingers just beyond clear vision.

That’s the genius of James: he trusts the imagination to fill in the shadow. Reading it, I found myself pausing, listening to the quiet of my own room, half convinced I’d see something move at the edge of my sight.

The other stories carried similar power. Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad turned a simple object—a whistle—into a conduit for terror. James’s ghosts never shout; they whisper.

Their menace comes from restraint, from suggestion, from the creeping thought that the supernatural is simply waiting for us to acknowledge it. I realized as I read that this was very different from the Stephen King or Shirley Jackson brand of horror I’d grown up with. James felt more intimate, like being told a chilling anecdote over port after dinner, except that by the end, you weren’t sure whether the storyteller himself had seen something he couldn’t quite admit.

By 2022, when I was reading it, horror for me was often tied to cinema, with its quick jolts and crafted atmospherics. James reminded me that the page could do it better, precisely because it left gaps. It was the silence between words that unsettled me most.

Closing the book, I thought about his ghost stories lingering like fog—thin, gray, and persistent. It wasn’t just entertainment; it was a reminder that sometimes the scariest thing isn’t what’s revealed, but what refuses to be explained.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...

A classic spine-chiller by M. R James, the 'father' of the modern ghost story, set on the windswept Suffolk coast, in which an amateur archaeologist pays the ultimate price for his curiousity.

Blurbs - In 'A Warning to the Curious', an amateur archaelologist from London, arrives in the seaside town of Seaburgh to search for the legendary silver Crown of Anglia which is believed to be hidden along the sandy shores of the North Sea. His research uncovers the tale of the late William Ager, the guardian of the crown, which leads him to unearth the ancient relic on a remote beach. However, having made his discovery, he becomes convinced that he is being followed, and desperate to escape the ghostly presence, decides his only hope is to return the crown to the desolate beach where it was unearthed - with tragic and terrifying consequences.

M R James (1862-1936) was a writer and scholar whose ghost stories are widely regarded as some of the best in English literature. He spent much of his childhood on the East Anglian coast, and the fictional town of 'Seaburg', in which this story is set, is based on the Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh.

Read by Alex Jennings Produced and abridged by Justine Willett.

[Beverly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I have read other of his ghost stories that were marvelous; all the ones in this collection were a little disappointing, except for "The Mezzotint". A print collector purchased one and precedes to notice that every day it changes a little. It is a picture of a country house in which a murder took place. I won't give away what he sees in the print, but it is eerie and quite gave me the creeps. I still think of it with a shudder and I read this in 2010. Michael Chabon believes that Victorian writers are really good at ghost stories, because they were the first to sense the chaos and terror which underlies the ordinary and that this theme still resonates to this day.

[Oziel Bispo · Rating 4 out of 5]

três coroas foram enterradas na cidade fictícia de Seaburgh, essas coroas servem para proteger o lugar. Um arqueológico descobriu que uma foi achada e derretida, a outra enferrujou se no fundo do mar, resta apenas uma e ele quer encontrar de todo jeito. ...uhm.... cuidado a curiosidade mata!

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creeeeepyyyyy

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Linguist, palaeographer, medievalist, antiquarian and biblical scholar – Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was all these, but the plain fact is that he was best known, even in his lifetime, as a writer of ghost stories. The last of his four collections of supernatural tales, entitled A Warning to the Curious, included six pieces and was published in 1925, eleven years before his death, aged 73.

But he wasn’t the only exponent of short stories in the supernatural genre, and across the Atlantic in the same year pulp writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft had one of his many stories published in Weird Tales: ‘The Festival’, though set in New England, owed much to the writer’s Anglophile leanings, so it seems apt to consider it alongside James’s contemporary collection.

A century on, do the contents of these intentionally spooky narratives still occasion the same thrills and shivers of anticipation as was offered in the period between two world wars? Only a plunge into their contents can confirm or contradict the reader’s assumptions or expectations.

The first item from James, ‘The Haunted Doll’s House’, was written – as the author’s own preface to his Collected Ghost Stories (1931) tells us – for “the library of Her Majesty the Queen’s Dolls’ House”, that is, Mary of Teck, the consort of George V. Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was constructed and completed by 1924, and this story was printed one-twelfth life-size to be housed with other specially written miniature volumes in the model building.

In the story an avid collector of unusual items such as antique dolls’ houses discovers extremely disturbing experiences occur regularly at one in the morning – a kind of 13 o’clock – in the presence of his recently acquired Gothic Revival house, suggesting dark deeds once took place in the original Strawberry Hill style house of which this is a scale copy. Will a bit of antiquarian research reveal whether the crime his waking vision witnesses actually took place?

The best thing about ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’ is its title, which refers to an unusual print-run of the Anglican Common Prayer Book from 1653 when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The four-section narrative is rather too diffuse for its own good: its focus shifts from an antiquarian visiting an obscure country house and chapel to a corpse in a London office, and there are far too many incidental details which don’t quite hang together, not aided by hints of xenophobia.

‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ is inspired by a Mosaic command in Deuteronomy 19:14 (“Thou shalt not take nor remove thy neighbour’s landmark”) which many countries pretending to be God-fearing have nevertheless flouted and continue to flout. In the case of this story it starts, as many of James’s stories start, with two leisured gentlemen in a library discussing a text – in this case a country saying which refers to a haunted wood which was subsequently removed, though the hauntings have evidently not stopped (as the narrator discovers, to his cost).

James rather draws the sting from the spookiness of the tale by quoting a real-life case of property fraud at the end; however he must have also had in mind Deuteronomy 27:17 (“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark”) for it’s the resulting curse that is the cause of the distressing malaise that the narrator of this fiction experiences.

Across a broad level plain they looked upon ranges of great hills, whose uplands – some green, some furred with woods – caught the light of a sun, westering but not yet low. And all the plain was fertile, though the river which traversed it was nowhere to be seen. There were copses, green wheat, hedges and pasture-land: the little compact white moving cloud marked the evening train. […] It was the acme of summer. — ‘A View from a Hill.’

According to the author’s introduction to his Collected Ghost Stories ‘A View from a Hill’ was inspired by the Herefordshire countryside, apparently with the Malvern Hills as a backdrop. Again, the account features two men, an academic and an older squire who’ve struck up a friendship, leading to the younger man Fanshawe paying a visit to the country squire and being shown the vista from a hill on the estate. Fanshawe cuts his finger on the box containing the unusual binoculars that he’s offered for his use, an instrument put together by Baxter, a local watchmaker and antiquary, now deceased; what Fanshawe sees through the lenses reveals details of a landscape which seems to have existed in the past.

James steadily builds up the tension by gradual revealing details, leading to the pair discovering the binoculars contain a kind of ichor which can only have been obtained by— No, you’d have to read the story to learn the dread secrets of Baxter’s activities.

The collection’s title story ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is set in the seaside town of Seaburgh (the thinly disguised town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk) and is a narrative set, puzzle box style, within a nest of other narrated tales. It concerns an explanation for the three golden crowns depicted on the shield of East Anglia – the coat of arms ascribed to Edmund, Anglo-Saxon monarch, saint and martyr – their concealment designed to magically protect the country from foreign invasion. What though if the last surviving example is disturbed and removed?

This last is a familiar folklore motif which James adapts to other circumstances, the message being that one should “leave well alone” those mysterious things one may come across. For the collection Ghosts and Marvels he wrote “Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo.” To my mind ‘A Warning to the Curious’ managed these two ingredients rather well.

Finally, ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’ purports to be the kind of ghost story that old women told to a captive audience of young people, a tale featuring a relative rarity among James’s output – a female narrator. A country squire’s mother rather mischievously aims to frighten the pants off her two grandchildren by informing them precisely why they mustn’t go down a particular lane. Astute readers will recognise suggestive motifs in her tale: an ancient chalk figure cut into the hillside near some barrows – a man resident in a cottage which he shares with a younger acolyte, both of whom shun church and chapel – a grisly sacrifice and a suicide – hints of druidical robes – echoes of Beelzebub as Lord of the Flies …

In terms of his ingredients – atmosphere and a crescendo – these six tales certainly display both, but occasionally the crescendo seems to arrive at a point which is somewhat anticlimactic because either the hints leading to it have been overly heavy or the actual climax is weighed down by an excess of detail expressed somewhat prosaically. His contemporary, Lovecraft, was usually guilty of the former but, unlike the more phlegmatic James, rarely succumbed to penning a quiet ending.

I don’t know if James was aware of Lovecraft’s writing but the latter certainly knew of his work, describing James, in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), as “gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life.” Lovecraft’s own approach to supernatural horror was equally antiquarian in nature, but the sense of impending evil is usually there much earlier on, with the sense of “prosaic daily life” fading rapidly away within a page or two.

In ‘The Festival’, written in 1923 but not published till early 1925, Lovecraft was apparently inspired by the Massachusetts town of Marblehead while becoming familiar with Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). Lovecraft’s editor S T Joshi quotes from a later letter that Marblehead (the model for Kingsport in his horror stories) provides “the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence,” awaking in the ardent Anglophile a sense of continuity, one which stretched through this New England town to “Old England” and included European antiquity.

Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes.amd steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, eillow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time first not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings […] — ‘The Festival.’

The town that the narrator visits, the home of his predecessors, is peopled by a sect which doesn’t celebrate Christmas but something more sinister. He joins a throng of hooded townspeople who process to the church on the hill, though not without noticing they leave no footprints in the snow. Within the church they all descend subterranean staircases and caverns measureless to man, as it were, down to a sunless sea where the worshippers proceed to mount unspeakable hybrid creatures . . . And then the narrator wakes up in hospital before being transferred to a specialist institution in Arkham.

Unlike James, whose ghosts and spirits were roused by unthinking transgressors, Lovecraft’s inhuman entities were other-dimensional gods which certain types were predisposed to seek out. And yet Lovecraft would have shared James’s opinions of what made the most chilling supernatural tales: “The ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”

Malevolent and odious indeed are the bogies in their tales, hinted at through the atmospheres conjured up by antiquity hovering on grey wings, their approach fearfully anticipated in a crescendo of incidental details and portents; there are no amiable or helpful apparitions here.

[Nancy Groves · Rating 4 out of 5]

A suitably creepy collection of stories by a man considered a master of the genre. Written in the first few decades of the 20th century, they typically fall into a pattern in which a gentleman scholar comes into unexpected contact with some supernatural menace when studying old manuscripts, visiting a historical structure such as an old church, or engaging in a bit of amateur archaeology. Perhaps they're a bit tame compared to some of today's horror stories, but several of the tales in this collection are often mentioned in lists of all-time great ghost stories. Reading the entire collection at once reinforces how much James followed a similar outline for each story and may make the reader wish for more variation, but individually or a few at a time they're likely to keep you turning the pages.

[John Yelverton · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this ghost story, a man discovers one of England's national treasures, but the guardians of that treasure want it put back.

[Peter G · Rating 3 out of 5]

An antique dolls’ house brought for a steal turns out to replay a demonic dumbshow every night at around midnight. A prayer-book twisted with its royalist patron's hatred for Oliver Cromwell visits revenge on a would-be thief. A historical border dispute engenders a ghostly presence in the local woods. A tinkering clockmaker embodies his newest tool with some unworldly powers. The guardians of the lost crown of East Anglia visit awful revenge on the man who removes it from its burial place.

These stories were written, or at least published, towards the end of M R James’s life. They have some of the markings of an old man whose creative well is quite running dry. Some (Dolls’ House, Prayer-Book, Landmark) are retreads of earlier ideas without the same sense of peril or perplexity. Others strike the reader with an odd sense of purposelessness. They certainly seem to lack the ambition of his earlier writing. Of course, James’s worst collection of the four is only disappointing by comparison to his earlier work. And it also contains, in its title story, one of the very best of his work.

I found that other than that story, which is rightfully famous, A View from a Hill was also fairly excellent. This one brushes up against some of the same ideas in Casting the Runes, with the amateur archaeologist Baxter taking the role of Karswell but I love the sort of janky homemade alchemy described here by James, and the way the folk learning, the esoteric, the theological, and the supernatural all come to coalesce in such a resonant manner.

I will say that I feel rather sad that there's so little of James now left to me. I plan to pick up a copy of the Collected Ghost Stories just to mop up the last few that were left uncollected (or abandoned) by the end of his life.

[tara bomp · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know what you're getting with M R James - spooky things from the past where if you dig too hard they'll kill you - but this really does feel just like ringing the changes on the same basic theme. The first story in this collection even has an author's note at the end saying "It will be said, perhaps, and not unjustly, that this is no more than a variation on a former story of mine called The Mezzotint. I can only hope that there is enough of variation in the setting to make the repetition of the motif tolerable.", which kind of sums it up. To be clear it's enjoyable enough! I expected basically this stuff. But it definitely feels like a step down in quality. Everyone is an antiquarian wandering about the countryside and staying at country houses. The spookiest story - A Warning to the Curious - feels quite similar to Count Magnus. But overall it's really hard to pick between these stories. I enjoyed it enough because I do really like his style but there's nothing special in these ones.

(Note that this is rating the stories from the original publication, the editions are a bit weird here. List copied from wikipedia:

"The Haunted Dolls' House"
"The Uncommon Prayer-Book"
"A Neighbour's Landmark"
"A View from a Hill"
"A Warning to the Curious"
"An Evening's Entertainment")

[Ralph Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is going to sound like a stupid thing to say but M.R. James stories chill me so much because you feel like they could be real. They had that just believable enough quality to be passed down ear-to-ear, eventually reaching our great narrator. But, the writer's voice is distinctive and authoritative. You picture the author with a big grey moustache twitching every time he speaks, dust coming off it. This might be why people said the horror genre was covered in dust and cobwebs, shadows and white satin sheets, before Stephen King started chucking blood around. But if any genre is going to be covered in dust and cobwebs, it might as well be this one. I'd still pick out M.R. James as the most respectable horror author, and maybe that's why his stories are so scary: why would this upright society gentleman tell me something so batshit unless it was true? There's also a distinct aspect of cold-cloth Christianity, that chilling Sunday morning bench, that ones gets from these stories. They mostly take place in churches, concern old architecture, and have large quantities of Latin.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last of the collections of the author’s ghost tales has enough proverbial meat clinging to the bones to warrant returning for the final meal, but it is not as deep of a feast as one might think. The tale centering on the collector and his haunted doll house is one that could easily play as a modern Tales from the Crypt episode, but much of the rest of the tales are James hitting his mark and doing so well enough, but the overarching returns are not what they were in the earlier collections. The end result? You should read this after the previous works - and it most assuredly should be read - but you will probably agree with my sentiments - James still has something to say in his ghostly tales, but it may seem to the reader that it is, perhaps, in parts, a little less than it once was and is not spoken as loudly or well. Still, it zings along better than most horror of this time and should be read for sure.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short little collection of only six stories, ranging from a haunted doll's house to haunted binoculars and dug-up-crowns-that-shouldn't-be. I enjoy James' short stories, but there's no denying that there's a sense of sameness about them: I've only just finished the book and already the stories are blurring together. I honestly can't remember enough about them separately to pick a favourite... I only know that there are stories out there, by the same author although not in this particular collection, that are better. Not exactly different, but better. He does have a story about this froggy demon thing in a well, if I remember rightly, which isn't in this but which does give me the creeps more than anything here.

So, average.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm late to the party, certainly. These are terrific stories, full of color, tone, and genuinely creepy. Despite their real atmospheric creepiness. It seems clear that these influenced Lovecraft as well, although they are quite different at times, with James's dry black humor and more-British-than-a-mere-New-Englander-could-ever-be tone and trappings. They're also compact with a great economy of language and plot, and I'm sure they will be well worth re-reading as they shift narrators sometimes several times in the course of a story (as Lovecraft does too.) My only regret is not having been reading and absorbing these excellent stories for decades already.

[Tom Meade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I should point out that several reviewers have mistaken this for the volume A Warning to the Curious published in James' lifetime, when it's actually a selection of James' better stories compiled by Ruth Rendell.

In any case, I really enjoyed this. The stuffiness of the prose just makes the oddity of the ghostly manifestations stand out even more. That said, these stories tended to give me a pleasant chill rather than genuinely frightening me. I've decided that I quite like M. R. James, but I do wish he'd gone a little further in these stories. Possibly some of his other work is a bit more gruesome.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5⭐

A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories is the title of M. R. James' fourth and final collection of ghost stories, published in 1925.
Introduction • essay by Ruth Rendell 4⭐
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook • (1895) 4⭐
The Tractate Middoth • (1911) 5⭐
The Mezzotint • (1904) 5⭐
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas • (1904) 5⭐
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral • (1910) 4⭐
The Ash-Tree • (1904) 4.5⭐
A Warning to the Curious • (1925) 5⭐
Casting the Runes • (1911) 5⭐
Number 13 • (1904) 4.25⭐
The Uncommon Prayer Book • (1925) 4⭐
Count Magnus • (1904) 4⭐
"Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" • (1904) 4⭐
Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance • (1911) 5⭐

[Rebecca Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange and mysterious story, one of the first on my gothic module that’s actually gave me chills. The importance I think lies with the mix of narrators, it’s interesting to take note at the beginning of who is telling who the story and whose telling stories within the story- it can get a bit confusing. Also the path and the tracks - the idea of being followed is really spooky and very relatable, the idea of being observed is quite scary in itself. Bit ambiguous whether the story is about a curse or a crazy man

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of scary short stories by a guy who wrote in a now-antiquated style that favors implied horror over overt gore, and intelligent use of language over facile short shock wording.

Horror is not my favorite genre, but I'd recommend this one. There are some grisly bits, but they happen mostly in the shadows and are all the scarier for it.

[Sarah Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was good, very short. I wish it had been longer and he expanded on it because it could’ve been even better. Eerie, but not scary. I’d hardly call it a ghost story, really. I only read “A Warning To the Curious,” not any others, but I couldn’t find any link for it alone. I listened to it on audible.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love James's first two ghost story collections, and his third is not bad, but this fourth and final volume is the weakest. The title story is really the only remarkable one, but it builds the tension quite well and has some moments that are genuinely menacing.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been years since I read this and my first time experiencing it in audio form. I have to say I loved the entire production. The story is just as effective for me now as it was when I first read it decades ago. Again, this was part of the Audible Plus program and I am convinced Audible is worth the investment for me.

[Michael Reffold · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good writing but fatally unfrightening. Read for Halloween but no scares to be found.

[Isabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me pareció la mejor historia de terror que he leído.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun, uncanny story about an ancient crown, with terrific narration by Derek Jacobi. Entertaining and enjoyable.