Simon Loxley. M.R. James took the supernatural tale out of a gothic setting and placed it firmly in the everyday, happening to everyday people, balanced, educated, sane. The horrors that occur don’t happen in the shadowy corridors of a crumbling fortress, or a cobweb-festooned catacomb. They happen in your hotel, in your house, in your bed. The stories have a simplicity and directness that make them not just highly effective on the page, but also as ideas and images to be transferred to the screen. They have never been out of print since they first appeared in 1904. His influence on the genre has been monumental.

The book looks at him and his work, and his relationship to the supernatural genre. In particular it focuses on the stories in which he uses to such great effect the landscape of the county of Suffolk, which he lived in, visited often, and knew so well.