Martin's Close, and the Stalls of Barchester Cathedral

by M.R. James

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), who published under the byline M. R. James, was a noted medieval scholar and provost of King s College, Cambridge (1905-1918) and of Eton College (1918- 1936), best remembered today for his ghost stories in the classic Victorian Yuletide vein. As a medieval scholar his output was phenomenal and remains highly respected in scholarly circles. His discovery of a manuscript fragment led to excavations in the ruins of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, West Suffolk, in 1902, in which the graves of several twelfth-century abbots described by Jocelyn de Brakelond (a contemporary chronicler) were rediscovered, having been lost since the Dissolution. His ghost stories were published in a series of collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). Other works include: Old Testament Legends (1913), Abbeys (1925), and Collected Ghost Stories (1931).

Genres: Horror

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1911

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

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Martin's Close is a little disjointed - as are many of James's stories, I am finding - in that it begins with a detailed depiction of some kind of country lane. The man describing it is hard to understand, and it got so that I couldn't quite picture what the hell "Martin's Close" actually looked like. Do you find it mentally unsettling, whenever learning that the way you visualised certain aspects of a story turn out to be completely different in something like a film's adaptation? I do.
Anyway, the story improves when it jumps back in time, or when James recounts over several excerpts from a cumulative pool of notes and documents - I was never really sure - the story of a man who murders a local town girl, and is subsequently haunted by her ghost. All in all, it was more of just the same. But there was still Some decent supernatural chills to be had when James describes the farm boy witnessing the dead girl walking out of the lake and disappearing into the woods.

The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral is as exciting as it sounds. The entire first half is more like a highly-descriptive catalogue of a certain church, and all its architectural features. I recognise the importance of setting up scenes with vivid imagery, but eventually I had to acknowledge that I wasn't really paying attention to the specific details. It's an old English church. I've been in loads of them; I know what they look like. I'm picturing the standard layout that my head has already stored inside it. The overlong descriptions, in this case, I just found superfluous. Literally sleep-inducing, as I was sitting in the bath as I read this story, and I actually started nodding off. That's right ... I take baths sometimes. Not as hygienic as showers, but damned if I can think of a more comfortable place to read. And now look who's being superfluous.
It does need saying, that the latter half of this story does get noticeably better. Again, James zones into one individual. An elderly churchman of sorts, who is losing his mind with age, and is hearing voices in his house. It all sounds very familiar to a modern horror reader, but nevertheless, James does present his usual flair in making this haunting a dark and chilling one.

Overall, I would say both stories reach just about average.