After Dark in the Playing Fields

M. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets pictures carvings a dolls house a lonely beach a branch tapping on a window ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense.