Why M.R. James is the Arthur Conan Doyle of supernatural fiction
What Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes are to the detective story, M.R. James’s tales of revenants and demons are to supernatural fiction. They remain the gold standard, the blue-chip stocks, the flowering perennials amid each spring’s evanescent annuals. Even though mystery and short horror tales have evolved significantly in the last century, when neophyte readers are seeking introductions to these genres, any wise elder still sends them first to Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” (1887) and James’s “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” (1904).
Though showing considerable variety in their plots and themes, James’s ghost stories typically feature a male scholar, often an unmarried university don, who notices something anomalous in a decaying church, an old manuscript or a bit of folklore. Despite warnings of various kinds, the protagonist rashly proceeds with his investigations, sometimes out of intellectual curiosity, sometimes hoping to unearth valuable relics or to acquire unnatural powers. Inevitably this meddling awakens the attention of demonic guardians, nearly always with mortal consequences. Above all, atmosphere, setting and a carefully controlled denouement are central to the success of these cozily unsettling tales. Among the most celebrated are “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” and “Casting the Runes,” but every reader will have his or her own favorites.
Rosemary Pardoe, founder of the journal Ghosts and Scholars, once compiled a list of various stories composed in the Jamesian manner. Among the titles on “The James Gang” list, as it is nicknamed, are such anthology favorites as E.F. Benson’s “Negotium Perambulans,” H.R. Wakefield’s “He Cometh and He Passeth By,” Eleanor Scott’s “Celui-là” and Margaret Irwin’s “The Earlier Service.” Only a small handful of novels make the cut, however, perhaps the best known being Kingsley Amis’s “The Green Man” (which I introduced for its New York Review paperback edition). But here I want to look at John Gordon’s “The House on the Brink” (1970) and Fritz Leiber’s “Our Lady of Darkness (1977), which Pardoe deemed “the two best novels in the M.R. James tradition.”
Initially marketed as a YA story of suspense, “The House on the Brink” (long hard to find but now available from Valancourt Books) is narrated in the third person, largely from the interior viewpoint of 16-year-old Dick Dodds. The setting is an English riverside town near some ominous marshlands. Gordon’s prose is relatively staccato, with lots of sentence fragments and short paragraphs, and the action moves rapidly, covering the events of just a few days. Much that occurs is slightly phantasmagoric, resulting in a story of psychological disorientation as well as physical threat.