Audio Recommendation: M R James
I’m blogging every day in the run-up to the US publication of Daughter of Genoa. Today, something a bit different.
I’m a massive fan of M R James, the Cambridge mediaevalist and antiquary who wrote some of the best scary stories in the English language. In fact, I adore “Monty” so much that I decided on the timeline of the novel I’m working on right now expressly so I could include him as a character.
There’s so much to admire about James. I love how he blends the banal and the terrifying: how he can take a familiar scene, a college or a cathedral, and infect it with a single thread of otherworldly fear that grows and grows until it defines everything. I love the playful way he draws on his vast well of academic knowledge to invent people and places, manuscripts and maps and rare books, all so realistic that they don’t seem like inventions at all.
And I come back over and over again, decades after they first scared me, to those deadly little lines of his that reveal some lurking horror: the “horrible hopping creature in white” from Karswell’s magic lantern show; the bedsheet ghost in Oh, Whistle, feeling blindly for its prey; the open window in The Mezzotint (“My goodness! he must have got in”).
Like The Exorcist, James is a constant influence on my own writing and thinking. So I was delighted to discover a YouTube channel with new audiobook versions of a number of his stories, alongside plenty of other Victorian and Edwardian classics from Arthur Conan Doyle, E F Benson, E Nesbit, Bram Stoker, etc. The narrator, Simon Stanhope, is a fantastic reader who does great justice to Monty’s works. I hope he’ll record more of them. (The Residence at Whitminster and An Episode of Cathedral History would be right at the top of my wishlist, followed by Rats.)
In the meantime, here is his rendering of one of my favourites: Count Magnus, the story of an enthusiastic researcher who falls under the spell of a charismatic figure from the past. It happens to all of us – but Mr Wraxall, I’m afraid, is a bad picker.
Are you awake, Count Magnus? If so, please stay where you are.
Daughter of Genoa is published in the US on December 9, 2025.