Book 25: "Collected Ghost Stories" by M.R. James

[kittiwake]

Well, the show went on, and the stories kept on becoming a little more terrifying each time, and the children were mesmerized into complete silence. At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park--Lufford, I mean--in the evening. Every child in the room could recognize the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered, and what it must have meant to the children doesn't bear thinking of.

M.R. James wrote his ghost stories between the 1890s and 1930s and most of them were initially told to colleagues and students at King's College Cambridge and Eton. A typical story would take place in an ancient building or on the desolate east coast of England, with a horror from the past being awoken when the unlucky protagonist unwittingly disturbs its rest. I really didn't like reading about a man reaching under his pillow only to touch a wet hairy mouth! Not a good story to read just before going to bed.

I was wondering why the white hopping thing in "Casting the Runes" seemed familiar even though that isn't one of the stories I have read before, but I think that is is because one of the model-makers in "The Bat Tattoo" by Rusell Hoban made a clockwork model showing that scene.