Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories - Six Classic Ghost Stories - cover

A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories - Six Classic Ghost Stories

M. R. James

Publisher: Diamond Book Publishing

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

M.R. James (1862–1936) was a medievalist scholar; Provost of King's College, Cambridge. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. His stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasise the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions.
Available since: 12/11/2021.

Other books that might interest you

  • Death in the Woods - From their pens to your ears genius in every story - cover

    Death in the Woods - From their...

    Sherwood Anderson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Sherwood Anderson was born on 13th September 1876 in Camden, Ohio. 
    When his father’s business failed the family was forced to move on a regular basis before finally settling in Clyde, Ohio.   
    Anderson, one of 7 children, left school at 14 to take a number of jobs to help with the family finances. These were difficult years. 
    He moved to Chicago in search of opportunities before joining the Army for the US-Spanish War of 1898.  He then entered Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio to complete his education before moving back to Chicago to take up a writing job. 
    In 1904 he married Cornelia Lane, her family had resources and Anderson was keen, with this family backing, to run a business. 
    The early years of their marriage produced 3 children but a nervous breakdown in 1907 and another in 1912, despite his success as a business entrepreneur, resulted in him abandoning his family and deciding that a literary career would be best for him.   
    A move back to Chicago resulted in a job in advertising, a divorce from Cornelia and marriage to Tennessee Mitchell.  
    That same year his first book ‘Windy McPherson’s Son’ was released and in 1919, his most famous book, ‘Winesburg, Ohio’, a collection of short stories about life in an Ohio town was released. 
    Anderson continued to write short stories, novels and non-fiction but his only true bestseller came with ‘Dark Laughter’.  His influence on writers that followed, from Faulkner to Hemingway, was immense. He also married a further two times.   
    Sherwood Anderson died in in Colón, Panama, on the 8th March, 1941. He was 64. An autopsy revealed that a swallowed toothpick had resulted in peritonitis. 
    His headstone epitaph reads ‘Life, Not Death is the Great Adventure.’
    Show book
  • The Story of B24 - From their pens to your ears genius in every story - cover

    The Story of B24 - From their...

    Arthur Conan Doyle

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 22nd May 1859.  His childhood was blighted by his father’s heavy drinking which for some years broke up the family. Fortunately, wealthy uncles were willing to support them by paying for education and clothing.  
    He was accepted at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine and also began to write short stories the first, ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine.  Despite several other stories and some articles in the British Medical Journal his medical studies took priority. 
    When these finished he was appointed as Doctor on the Greenland whaler ‘Hope of Peterhead’ in 1880 and then, after graduation, as ship’s surgeon on the SS Mayumba on its voyage to West Africa. 
    1882 saw a move to Plymouth and his own independent practice. With few patients he resumed writing and completed his first novel, ‘The Mystery of Cloomber’, although most of his output was short stories based on his experiences at sea.  
    He married Louisa Hawkins in 1885. However, two years later he met and fell in love with Jean Elizabeth Leckie, though they remained platonic out of respect for, and loyalty to, his wife. 
    His literary career suddenly burst into life in November 1886 with ‘A Study In Scarlet’, the first of the fabulously successful Sherlock Holmes stories.  
    With two children to support he now revisited his haphazard commercial arrangements and curtailed everything save for commissions from the Strand Magazine.  
    As a sportsman he was remarkably proficient. He was goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club and played ten first-class cricket matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club as well as captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in East Sussex.  
    In 1891 tired of writing Holmes stories, he began a series of historical novels and even went so far as to apparently kill off Holmes in a lethal brawl with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. 
    Despite heavy and sustained criticism he continued to write in support of the Boer War, a fact he thought contributed to his knighthood in 1902.  The following year to great relief and acclaim he brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead in his first outing for a decade. 
    Sadly, his wife Louisa died from TB in 1906 and, a year later, he at last married Jean.  
    During the War and for several years after family deaths had left him depressed. In a search for solace and answers he alighted upon spiritualism and, such was his interest, that he wrote several books on the subject. 
    On 7th July 1930 Conan Doyle was discovered in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in East Sussex, clutching his chest dying of a heart attack.  He was 71.
    Show book
  • Standing Her Ground - Classic Short Stories by Trailblazing Women - cover

    Standing Her Ground - Classic...

    Harriet Sanders

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    All the stories in Standing Her Ground have been chosen to celebrate the skill, the passion and achievements of women writers spanning one hundred years of innovation. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is edited by Harriet Sanders.Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature. Writer and activist Alice Dunbar Nelson was an early adopter of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Kate Chopin and Elizabeth Gaskell dared to explore themes outside the strict social codes of their times. And Virginia Woolf was hugely influential in both the feminist and modernist movements.From ‘The Manchester Marriage’, in which a husband, supposedly drowned at sea, returns to find his daughter, to the two sisters who are comically adrift after the death of their domineering father in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and a young girl who enlists the help of a sorceress to win back her boyfriend in ‘The Goodness of Saint Rocque’, Standing Her Ground showcases nine groundbreaking women writers.
    Show book
  • Nostromo - cover

    Nostromo

    Joseph Conrad

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad has transformed an apocryphal anecdote about a sailor who got away with stealing a boat loaded with silver into a grandly panoramic, yet deeply unsettling, narrative that sees every conceivable type of political person — from the laughably oafish and brutal to various shades of the well-meaning — caught up in an episode of revolutionary upheaval in the fictional South American country of Costaguana. Who, if anyone, will emerge from this dreadful saga with a shred of dignity left intact ?
    Show book
  • Inhabitant of Carcosa An - cover

    Inhabitant of Carcosa An

    Ambrose Bierce

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Title: An Inhabitant of Carcosa 
    Author: Ambrose Bierce 
    Narrator: Jonathan Dunne 
    Original Publication: 1886 
    Public Domain: Yes 
    Series Placement: Number 46 in the Timeless Terrors series 
    Description: 
    An Inhabitant of Carcosa by Ambrose Bierce is a haunting vision of death, memory, and cosmic revelation. In a desolate landscape shrouded in silence, a lost soul named Hoseib wanders among ancient ruins, struggling to recall who he is and how he came to be there. As he journeys through the remnants of a forgotten civilization, a terrible truth emerges — he walks through the ruins of his own world, long dead and buried. 
    Through its eerie stillness and philosophical depth, Bierce’s story anticipates the cosmic unease later explored by Chambers and Lovecraft. It is one of the earliest works to hint at a vast, indifferent universe — where death is not an ending, but an eternal realization. 
    Narrated by Amazon bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures the quiet terror and melancholy beauty of Bierce’s prose — the slow unveiling of mortality beneath a sky where even the stars seem mournful. While the text is in the public domain, this narration is an original performance and copyright © 2025 Jonathan Dunne. 
    Part of Timeless Terrors, a series devoted to resurrecting the masters of the macabre and uncanny, An Inhabitant of Carcosa endures as a cornerstone of early cosmic horror — a whisper from the grave reminding us that the dead may still walk among the ruins.
    Show book
  • A Short History of Indians in Canada - Stories - cover

    A Short History of Indians in...

    Thomas King

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Winner of the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year and the Aboriginal Fiction Book of the Year—a collection of twenty short stories told in Thomas King's classic, wry, irreverent, and allegorical voice.
    Show book