Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
by M. R. James · 1931
The omnibus gathering of James's four collections plus strays: 'Casting the Runes' (occult revenge by cursed slip of paper, later filmed as Night of the Demon), 'A Warning to the Curious' (a dug-up Anglian crown and its tireless guardian), 'The Mezzotint', 'Count Magnus' and more than two dozen others. Read together they map a haunted England of cathedral closes, coastal digs and country libraries where curiosity is the cardinal sin. The definitive bedside book for anyone who likes their dread courteous and their revenants implacable.
The standard one-volume James and a permanent fixture of horror's canon, continuously in print for over ninety years.
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
The book that, with King's early run, defined the late-70s horror boom's upper register — King has called it one of the finest horror novels of the century — and the modern model for the guilt-returns ghost narrative; filmed, reductively, in 1981.
The consensus finest haunted-house novel in the language: source of Robert Wise's classic 1963 film and Mike Flanagan's 2018 series, and the structural model for every psychological haunting since — King's The Shining declares the debt openly.