Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Hardcover)

That said, it's a shame that so many readers will encounter James for the first time in Oxford's new collection of "Casting the Runes & Other Ghost Stories", which is the cheesiest, shoddiest edition of James's work I have ever encountered. In light of James's dark brilliance, this slipshod edition is the equivalent of serving Kristal Champagne in a plastic coke bottle, or offering Sevruga caviar from a tuna can.

I was initially excited at getting all of my favorite Jamesian tales of terror bound up in a new hardback volume from OUP. Imagine my intial shock when the tiny tome arrived---and I do mean TINY. Check out those book dimensions carefully, folks: this edition is a teensy vanity hardback about the size of the little abridged poetry volumes booksellers stock during the holidays for stocking stuffers, usually kept at the cash register.

Think about that for a second. Think about getting twenty-three James tales, 293 pages in total, into a teeny-tiny little book. Think of just how miniscule the print on those stories would have to be, or how absent the book would have to be of anything resembling normal margins.

Well, think about it, and then think hard before wasting your money on this edition, because this is pretty much M.R. James for Lilliputians. I have 20/20 vision and I need a magnifying glass to read the type comfortably. Oh, and remember all the scholarly annotations supplied by James scholar Michael Cox in the previous edition? As one reviewer noted, the asterisks are still there, but the annotations have been gutted.

Even better, apparently to save on paper and space the Oxford editors, in their infinite wisdom, cut out the James essay "Stories I Have Tried to Write" that appeared in the previous edition. Mind you, this is an essay that has graced *every* edition of "Casting the Runes" since the first publishing run, and they just---cut it out.

Oh, it gets better. In place of the erudite Cox, we now have Michael Chabon's witless introduction, in which Chabon appears eager to show how many literary works he is familiar with, but proves unable to get the name of James's protagonist in "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, Lad" right. Given that Chabon professes in the first sentence of his review that "Oh Whistle" is one of the finest short stories ever written, one would think M. Chabon would realize the name of the story's hero is Parkins, not Parke.

This edition is so shabby, cheap, and shoddy as to make even the most fervent bibliophile yearn for a good book-burning. James deserves better, and I hope his ghost haunts Oxford University Press.

He is excellent! He is one of the best, most underappreciated voices in horror. Lovecraft admired him. His stories, though old, are quite scary. Also, they are very well written. As Chabon points out in his intro, Poe and Lovecraft weren't the best literary stylists. Most people cite "Oh, Whistle..." as James's best story, but I think I'll vote for "Count Magnus." Certainly all of them are good. More than that, they are REQUIRED reading for anyone who wants to have a basic understanding of horror literature. It is also a hell of a good read.

Second, this edition:

I was greatful to a previous reviewer for explaining the asterisks. There are asterisks without footnotes all over this book, as well as other Oxford University Press books (The Monk). Now we know that these are residue from a previous edition that HAD footnotes. Perhaps you might want to get that version.

However, I take great issue with the disparaging of Michael Chabon's essay on M.R. James. If you don't get the edition with his introduction, I recommend going to the bookstore and reading through it anyway. His comments are very illuminating on James and ghost stories in general.