Disturbing, touching, and hard to forget, it tells the story of a governess - or is that two governesses? Taylor plays with time and character shifts so cleverly that the joins are hard to spot. Elisabeth Taylor Poor GirlĪn exquisite vignette by one of the underrated writers of our time, Poor Girl explores the erotic possibilities of haunting. You will never look at an unmade bed in the same way again. As here, James often draws on the familiar childhood nightmare of pursuit by a faceless creature. Many of his pieces take place in the flatlands of East Anglia and this is a particularly effective example, set on a haunted - and haunting - beach at night. MR James - not to be confused with Henry - was the greatest practitioner of traditional ghost stories, spine-chilling tales designed to be read by a dying fire in a darkened room after dinner. MR James O Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad The moral is: Be careful what you wish for - and don't open the door at night. If it's terror you want, this well-known story of a magical talisman is hard to beat – not to be read when alone at night. A ferocious study in greed and ambition, it has the most chilling denouement of any ghost story. RL Stevenson The Body-SnatcherĪs beautifully written and atmospheric as you would expect from Stevenson, this tale set in mid-19th century Scotland is about the grave robbers who provided the gruesome materials for medical schools. The stories in my list all send chills down the spine: at the same time they combine entertainment value with high literary quality.

The other masterly works here include 'The Jolly Corner', 'Owen Wingrave' and further tales of visitations, premonitions, madness, grief and family secrets, where the living are just as mysterious and unknowable as the dead.Haunting is a complex phenomenon which can involve many different causes: not only spirits but also memories, things, ideas and places. This new collection brings together eight of James's tales exploring the uncanny, including his infamous ghost story, 'The Turn of the Screw', a work saturated with evil, in which a fraught governess becomes convinced that malicious spirits are menacing the children in her care. 'I see ghosts everywhere', wrote Henry James, who retained a fascination with the supernatural and sensational throughout his writing career. 'There had been a moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep' An unsettling new collection of Henry James's best short stories exploring ghosts and the uncanny

Ghost stories by henry james