You have been warned

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme: ‘Dom im Winter’ (1821).

A Warning to the Curious (1925)
by M R James,
in Collected Ghost Stories,
Wordsworth Classics, 1992.

‘The Festival‘ (1925) by H P Lovecraft in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
edited by S T Joshi.
Penguin Books, 1999.

Linguist, palaeographer, medievalist, antiquarian and biblical scholar –  Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was all these, but the plain fact is that he was best known, even in his lifetime, as a writer of ghost stories. The last of his four collections of supernatural tales, entitled A Warning to the Curious, included six pieces and was published in 1925, eleven years before his death, aged 73.

But he wasn’t the only exponent of short stories in the supernatural genre, and across the Atlantic in the same year pulp writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) had one of his many stories published in Weird Tales: ‘The Festival’, though set in New England, owed much to the writer’s Anglophile leanings, so it seems apt to consider it alongside James’s contemporary collection.

A century on, do the contents of these intentionally spooky narratives still occasion the same thrills and shivers of anticipation as was offered in the period between two world wars? Only a plunge into their contents can confirm or contradict the reader’s assumptions or expectations.