Press Release, 18 July 2011
Nunkie Productions release a CD of rare material by the Master of the English ghost story
CURIOUS CREATURES
The Shorter Horror of M R James
Read by R M Lloyd Parry
Are there, here and there, sequestered places which some
curious creatures still frequent… ?
Montague Rhodes James [1862 – 1936] asked this question at the end of A Vignette, the last ghost story he ever wrote. This enigmatic, eerie tale is set in his childhood home in Suffolk, and apparently relates an authentic supernatural experience, one that he says “has had some formidable power of clinging through many years to my imagination.” It was published in a London magazine five months after his death, and is one of nine shorter, lesser-known works included on this pleasingly terrifying new double CD – two of which have never been recorded before.
Curious Creatures… also includes: A Livermere Poem ● A Night in King’s College Chapel ● The Malice of Inanimate Objects ● Rats ● A School Story ● There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard ● After Dark in the Playing Fields ● Stories I Have Tried to Write
The CD is performed and produced by actor and playwright Robert Lloyd Parry. Since 2005 he has toured a trilogy of one-man shows based on six of M R James’s best-loved tales around the UK, USA and Ireland. Reviewing the first of these, The Times said “Lloyd Parry catches the sense of dread that gives James his originality”. In 2008 he was award the Dracula Society’s Hamilton Deane Award for Best Performance in the Gothic Genre.
Curious Creatures – The Shorter Horror of M R James is available for £16.99 inc. p+p from www.nunkie.co.uk
For further details please contact Robert Lloyd Parry on roblloydparry@hotmail.com or 07722 859011.
Showing posts with label M R James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label M R James. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Lovecraft's Legacy (1965) A Lovecraft Reference
From: The Supernatural, Douglas Hill & Pat Williams, p.13, Signet New American Library, 1965.
After the turn of the century the peak of the craze for horror fiction leveled off, though there remained a demand for it among the reading public. New names were cropping up - names that are today acknowledged as the modern (rather than Gothic) masters of horror. America's H P. Lovecraft dominated the genre with the incredible mythology he created (monsters of ancient evil released on this world by dabblers in forbidden arts) and with the disciples and imitators he gathered. In Britain, M. R. James produced his handful of perfectly constructed ghost stories, which became classics almost overnight, while that strange individual Arthur Machen gained fame more slowly with his unique visions of the macabre. (In the end his popular fame is due to an accident: he wrote a story during World War I about angelic hosts assisting the British forces; the people and the soldiers, hungry for a miracle, seized upon the idea and insisted that it had really happened - that the soldiers had seen the "Angels of Mons" with their own eyes.)
After the turn of the century the peak of the craze for horror fiction leveled off, though there remained a demand for it among the reading public. New names were cropping up - names that are today acknowledged as the modern (rather than Gothic) masters of horror. America's H P. Lovecraft dominated the genre with the incredible mythology he created (monsters of ancient evil released on this world by dabblers in forbidden arts) and with the disciples and imitators he gathered. In Britain, M. R. James produced his handful of perfectly constructed ghost stories, which became classics almost overnight, while that strange individual Arthur Machen gained fame more slowly with his unique visions of the macabre. (In the end his popular fame is due to an accident: he wrote a story during World War I about angelic hosts assisting the British forces; the people and the soldiers, hungry for a miracle, seized upon the idea and insisted that it had really happened - that the soldiers had seen the "Angels of Mons" with their own eyes.)
Often the great literary men would make excursions into horror fiction and the supernatural-among them Dickens, Kipling, Walter de la Mare, Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. Perhaps it is partly due to their presence in the field that the supernatural story has retained its relatively prominent place on our bookshelves. But another reason is that the modem horror story (with certain modifications that usually offend traditionalist lovers of Gothic) forms an important branch of "fantasy and science fiction" - which, in the realm of popular fiction, now ranks second only to the detective story. Science fantasy today owes much to the imagination of H. G. Wells-but it is not all interplanetary strife, time traveling, and similar technological marvels. Much of it owes a debt to Poe as well. For instance, one of the most acclaimed masters of this sub-genre is the American writer Ray Bradbury, whose unique poetic style embraces spaceships and the future on the one hand (The Martian Chronicles) and witches, vampires, and magic on the other (October Country). Similarly, August Derleth (also American) is at once an indefatigable antholigizer of the spaceship type of Science Fiction and a leading disciple of H. P. Lovecraft.
From the book: Images of a 1952 seance captured by camera.
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