October without M.R. James is like Thanksgiving without Pumpkin Pie

 I've gotten into the habit of reading some M. R. James every October. His ghost stories are quite influential, which is impressive considering he has a fairly small body of work in that area. I view him as one of the bridges between the Victorian, gothic tradition and the modern ghost story.  I first discovered him because his stories had influenced the The Ring by Koji Suziki, which became the basis for the manga and the movies.

Since I'd read Ghost Stories of an Antiquary several times, I decided to read A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories. I'm pretty sure I read it when I first discovered James and blitzed my way through his ghost stories but I had almost no memory of the book. It was like I was reading it for the first time.

And, I have to admit, it felt like leftover ideas that he didn't want to bother with earlier.

spoilers

spoilers

spoilers

spoilers

spoilers

spoilers

spoilers

spoilers

It really says something that, at the end of The Haunted Doll's House, James included an apology admitting that the story resembled his earlier work The Mezotiny. The most problematic story, though, is An Evening's Entertainment. The story is twice nested, first in an essay lamenting how the tradition of oral storytelling is fading and second by a hypothetical grandmother telling a story. James uses framing devices almost constantly but this felt disjointed and distracting. I will come back to this story, though.

Honestly, though, what I felt this collection was lacking was a sense of things being dire, at least for the protagonist. Earlier stories like Count Magnus or the Treasure of Abbot Thomas, just to name two, gave a sense of visceral danger, sometimes to the point of an unhappy ending. In A Warning to the Curious, the protagonists, at most, watch other people being in dire trouble. The horrible deaths happen to other people, sometimes people they don't even care about.

With that being said, the stories are perfectly good and there are some nice touches. The death at the end of the story A Warning to the Curious with destruction of the victim's mouth is properly disturbing. And the previously mentioned An Evening's Entertainment, once you get through the two layers of framing devices, may be the strongest story in the collection. It does a good job of leaving out enough details to make things mysterious but giving you enough for the story to hold together.

A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories is not M. R. James at his strongest and not what I would recommend to start with. However, if you are going to be a completist (like me), it's not an unrewarding read.