After wondering if it was going to be a bit too dry to be enjoyable, I've really got into
Culture & Imperialism. It's obviously immaculately researched and has made me want to read a whole load of other stuff (from Kipling to Camus to Fanon, as contradictory as that may sound). His erudition is pretty imposing but if you put the effort in it's actually not at all unapproachable.
Yesterday I picked up a very small and cheap sampler of M. R. James stories titled simply
Ghosts, on the basis that it was high time I got some MRJ exposure. I don't know if any of them 'scared' me as such, but they are beautifully written, and reminded of someone here (Slothrop?) describing James as being a sort of anti-Loveraft, in that his stories aren't overwritten or hysterical and have no overarching 'mythos', but are just effective, self-contained supernatural tales. What did surprise me was the quite effective touches of humour here and there - in particular, two of the stories have a bit that goes something like "The two friends then talked about golf for an hour. (Readers who golf may imagine for themselves the topics touched on; I will spare non-golfers the pain of having to read about their conversation.)"
I also bought a volume of ghost stories by Henry James (what is it about supernatural fiction and being called 'James'?) and of course went straight for
The Turn Of The Screw. Pros: highly atmospheric, builds the tension excruciatingly slowly, as any story of this sort should. Cons: AAAAARGH, the prose! HJ writes in the most convoluted, torturous and contrived sentences I've ever encountered, often to the point of rendering the text literally meaningless. I mean, consider:
This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that to throw myself into it was to throw myself out of my trouble.
It's complete gibberish! And rendered all the more ridiculous by supposedly being the hand-written deposition of the main character.
Shame, because the bits that
aren't like that are pretty good. I suspect that if Thomas Ligotti were to do a kind of cover version of this story, it would be as close as you could get to the perfect ghost story.