A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories

Six ghost stories: a doll's house that plays out the same murder every night for whoever is awake to watch, a prayer-book printed with the cursing psalms, a wood a man is warned not to walk in, a pair of field-glasses that show the country as it was, a crown dug out of a barrow on the Suffolk coast and the thing that guards it, and a fireside tale of what a village did about a poisoner. M. R. James was a Cambridge medievalist who wrote these to be read aloud to colleagues at Christmas, and invented the modern English ghost story doing it — an antiquary, a document, and something that should have been left alone. Fifty-nine plates by painters including John Atkinson Grimshaw and Vilhelm Hammershøi run from 1730 to 1923, their haunted harbours and shadowed interiors the perfect weather for these six tales of old things best left alone.