An Interview With Simon Loxley

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a British academic and ghost story author whose tales are some of the best-known and most respected in the genre. John Bellairs was a fan and agreed with James that "spooky tales are most effective when the ghastly things happen to people who are going about their business in an ordinary, matter-of-fact world… (Locus, 1991). Bellairs was a Jamesian fan – and included a few homages in his novels – as is Simon Loxley, a British graphic designer and writer on design. Loxley's fandom went as far as writing and self-publishing A Geography of Horror: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James and the Suffolk Landscape, in 2021. It's taken us over a year to order the book, read (and reread), and conduct our interview, but Loxley was game – and here we are.

Something About Sanitizing In A Church

Caveat subscriptor (sort of).

Something About Scary Ghost Stories

No tales of the Plaça de les Glòries. Sorry.

Interview: Wolfgang-Armin Rittmeier

Fans of John Bellairs are found in several countries - including Germany, where Wolfgang-Armin Rittmeier proudly celebrates one of his favorite authors.  Wolfgang recently shared his favorite things about Bellairs's books and his thoughts on literary translations – and then some more about his second favorite author, M. R. James. Fröhliches lesen!

A Bit About "Number 13"

If the room is a rockin’....

A Bit About "The Ash-tree"

Tangled web, and all that.

A Bit About “The Mezzotint”

Images of heaven. Or not.

Something More About 'Lost Hearts'

Say uncle!

A Bit About "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book"

Hand in hand.

Something About Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Jones on James.

Something About Adapting The Tractate Middoth

Rant verses rave.

Something About a Heart-Shaped Padlock

I got a new complaint.

World views of M.R. James and S.T. Joshi

Commentary from Omnia Exeunt In Mysterium on S.T. Joshi, the preeminent scholar in the study of weird fiction:

'Tis Fitz We Understand

The prefix Fitz- is an old word for "son of", especially used for the illegitimate sons of royalty.  Bear that in mind as we lay out this factoid.

We recently came across this exciting book, A Descriptive Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum, by Montague Rhodes James (yeah, that M. R. James). The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge and was founded in 1816 with the bequest of the library and art collection of the 7th Viscount FitzWilliam.

M. R. James and That Which Creep Like Shadows...

An interesting study of the works of M.R. James from the Guardian:

The "ominous thing" in James's stories, written between the 1890s and 1930s, might be a sheeted ghost (Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come to You, My Lad), a corpse crawling from its grave (The Mezzotint), or something grotesque and tentacular (The Treasure of Abbot Thomas). Whichever form it takes it will be malevolent and capable of killing. There are no Caspers to be found here.

Something About Jamesian Inspirations

Knowing Bellairs was fond of the ghost stories of M. R. James has led a few people to send us their recommendations for similar tales.  What's your verdict?

Something About 'Lost Hearts'

We've noted some of the similarities between the introduction to The House with a Clock in its Walls and M.R. James’s Lost Hearts. Now you can see some screen shots from a 1970s-era adaptation of Lost Hearts (which looks creepier than the 1970s-era adaptation of The House with a Clock in its Walls, for that matter). A warning to the curious (!) but this is not for faint-hearted.

Diaphanous Sprites of the Upper Air

You don’t see references to Snodrog from The Pedant and the Shuffly often but here’s one: a ghost made of bed sheets in a M.R. James story reminds someone of the Flimsies “flying out into the night to do his [Snodrog’s] bidding and smother people in their sleep.” 

Moments of Clarity, Ambiguity

Maybe it's the fact we've been doing this for years and all our research is taking its toll. Maybe it’s the expectation of trying to top ourselves year after year. Do we subconsciously associate mundane items and events thrown at us by life, misconstrue them, and then try to find some veiled Bellairsian reference or influence? 

Maybe we need a rest.

Happy Birthday, M.R. James

We celebrate what would have been the 144th birthday of historian and author Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), long remembered for his series of ghost stories. Following English tradition, many of his 30-plus stories were written and read aloud during Christmas Eve gatherings of friends.