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One of the most recurring themes in M. R. James is the idea that the comforts of the present were afforded by the horrors of the past. Fey, fusty, middle-class men of leisure are able to pour their time into their pet hobbies because their ancestors waged war with the powers of political corruption and spiritual evil. In a sense, the road to their lives of ease and petty passions was paved with the broken bones and spilled blood of millions of their hardscrabble forefathers.

Dear Friends, As many of you know, 2023 has been the ten-year anniversary of Oldstyle Tales Press, a project I started planning in grad...

We are continuing to celebrate Oldstyle Tales’ 10th anniversary during the month of November by highlighting neglected Victorian supernatural tales from our very first publication, The Best Victorian Ghost Stories, which was first released on Halloween, 2013. And we have news! Due to the warm response which you've given this series, we will be releasing an expanded, ten-year anniversary, third edition of this anthology, complete with updated commentary and four new ghost stor

We are continuing to celebrate Oldstyle Tales’ 10th anniversary during the month of November by highlighting rarely commented upon tales from our very first publication, The Best Victorian Ghost Stories, which was first released on Halloween, 2013. This week’s episode is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s relentless, feminist revenge fantasy, “The Cold Embrace…” The typical ghost story in Victorian Britain followed this formula: a misdeed is done, often secretly, and the truth is not e

When I’ve agreed to take on a new book to review, I often remark how the novel or collection in question must have been written by a...

In honor of Oldstyle Tales’ 10th anniversary, for the month of November we will be highlighting rarely commented upon tales from our very first publication, The Best Victorian Ghost Stories, which was first released on Halloween, 2013. As this was our first book, the commentary on these stories was much shorter and less detailed (I was still trying to find my voice and wasn’t quite sure how “much” was too much or not enough), but I hope that I was still successful in fleshing

In this third and final entry in our Over the Garden Wall trilogy, we’ll be taking a deep look into the holiday which the series is built around. As such – fair warning – it is also my long overdue love letter to Hallowe'en. To begin with, let’s acknowledge that there is absolutely no intrinsic reason why this story had to take place on Hallowe’en – it was a deeply intentional choice on McHale’s part, and should be considered deeply important. Other times of year could be j

Our previous post – the first in this series – took an expansive look at Over the Garden Wall’s visual, musical, and literary influences,...

Although Oldstyle Tales primarily focuses on the elegant horrors found in classic literature, today we'll be grafting a 21st century...

Throughout his oeuvre, Jacobs frequently produced stories about people who are drawn towards ethically dubious decisions, irrevocably side against their better judgment, and are left stranded in a harsh and hostile dimension of karmic punishment. A genuinely grave tale, “The Three Sisters” follows the tradition of “Jerry Bundler” and “The Toll-House” by juxtaposing feigned hauntings with horrific outcomes. The story follows a favorite theme of Jacobs: aspirational avarice and

One of Lovecraft’s perennial – and most famous – sources of horror was the sea. Like so many of his predecessors and influences, he viewed it as both an alien realm of misanthropic threats, and a handy symbol for the vile muck of the human unconscious. He is specifically indebted to Edgar Allan Poe and William Hope Hodgson for the following story – one which is arguably his first great story. Poe defined the nautical horror story in two tales (“MS. Found in a Bottle” and “Int

“A School Story” ranks among James’ vaguely-defined puzzlers, and – like so many of his puzzlers, including “Two Doctors” and “An Evening’s Entertainment” – it has had mixed reception. Every now and then, especially as he grew older, James seemed to delight in writing an inscrutable tale that may have laid out all of its cards, or may be holding some back: perhaps we knew all we needed to know, or perhaps the story was hiding a few clues as to its true meaning. These stories

Cryptic, opaque, and disturbing, the first salvo in Irving’s “Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” is also, sadly, one of his most underappreciated and maligned masterpieces. The story is regularly derided for its seemingly anticlimactic ending and has been called everything from a waggish Gothic farce to an artless literary miscarriage. The first time I read “Tales of a Traveller,” however, none of the stories left me as chilled as the first – it seemed pregnant with hidden meani

The modern concept of a vampire is only about two centuries old and some change. Aristocratic, posh, and stylish, we picture a vampire as a vision of seductive, masculine power bent over a sleeping woman, and greedily drinking blood from her ivory neck. During Hoffmann’s prime the vampire was considered more of a ghoul or cannibal: eating the flesh of the recently dead. What’s more, it was hardly well-dressed or suave, but wild and zombie-like: a stinking, fetid corpse with s

One of Hodgson’s most gruesome and revolting stories, “The Derelict” is a fascinating blend of science fiction, sea adventure, and grisly mystery—a tale that would have made H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells proud. All three regularly wrote speculative fiction inspired by the rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge available at the turn of the twentieth century, preferring, at times, to derive their horrors from hypothetical discoveries rather than t

Master Humphrey’s Clock began as a periodical in 1840 and ran for twenty months, at which time its stories were collated into the novel of the same name. It featured the eponymous story-teller – a friend of Squire Pickwick’s – who shares his penchant for good tales, heartbreaking and hilarious, inspiring and infuriating alike. A kindly eccentric, he keeps his collection of yarns stored in the inside of an antique grandfather clock, and reads them to his raptured audience of l

“The Mask” begins with one of the most substantial artifacts that we have from The King in Yellow, a scene commonly referred to as “the unmasking.” This episode seems to have been largely influenced by the Edgar Allan Poe horror tale, “The Masque of the Red Death.” In this story, the aristocrats of a country plagued by the “red death” (a ghoulish amalgamation of the black plague, tuberculosis, cholera, and scarlet fever) lock themselves up in the prince’s castle numbed to the

Mood was Blackwood’s primary medium. He was a master of the slow-developing atmosphere which blooms in front of us like a black and white photo negative gradually warming to sepia, then glowing in glorious color. His writing – the best of it, at any rate – does not rely on horror. Rather, it finds its stride in building terror and psychological unease in the readers’ minds. Mood pervades his masterpieces, and while he augments them with touches of the macabre, his greatest st

Like his earlier short-story scrapbooks The Ways of Ghosts and Some Haunted Houses, the following anthology series is written in a particularly reporterly style which lends it to being taken as non-fiction. In fact, while the other two anthologies have only occasionally been mistaken as genuine reports on local supernatural accounts, Mysterious Disappearances has been so effective at creating the atmosphere of journalism that it has been extensively reprinted in many books on

One of M. R. James’ most beloved areas of research was in Scandinavian history and folklore. In “Count Magnus,” he underscores the fact...

Commonly rated among the top ten of James’ stories by his admirers, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” stands out as having many of the great tropes of what has come to be called a “Jamesian” tale: it follows a starchy English academic on an ill-fated holiday to a remote, backwards town (far from the Hobbit-esque comforts and required civility of Cambridge) where he is hopelessly drawn in by the allure of a sinister antique which brings with it a spectral guardian – eager to make h

NOTE: Each October I write a ghost story or weird tale for Hallowe'en and post it here. The following piece is 2022's "Ghost Story for...

I seem to keep running into delightful firsts this year when it comes to my reviews. Today’s first – just in time for Hallowe’en – is an...

“We had all begun to accept that things may never go back to normal. Civilization as we knew it was in the midst of a great turning. We...