The Alabaster Hand

A wonderful book of M R Jamesian inspired ghost stories, with one of my absolute favourites of the genre - "An Encounter in the Mist". By the end of the book you've pretty much come to terms with the fact that Munby only ever had one book of ghost stories in him, but you're glad he managed the one. "An Encounter in the Mist" for my money is one of the absolute crown jewels in any ghost story collection with a twist any author would be proud of. For that story alone it's worth tracking down (Incidentally, my copy has the ridiculously unchilling seventies copy and cost me a couple of quid on ebay, I'm glad to say!)

Since starting to read M.R. James' ghost stories a few years ago, I've been also hunting up a copy of A.N.L. Munby's The Alabaster Hand, a collection of fourteen Jamesian-style tales written while Munby was being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. I was delighted to come across this new edition, which isn't perhaps the perfect setting for Munby's stories, but will certainly do given the scarcity of earlier editions.

It's true, many of Munby's stories don't quite rise to the level of James', but all of them make for good reading and several of them are so thoroughly enjoyable that as soon as I finished I went back and read them again. Munby puts the tropes and themes of the antiquarian ghost stories to excellent show more use, and very playfully inserts some really unexpected twists. show less

Antiquarian ghost stories in the style of M. R. James', but somehow not as rich, or mysterious, or suspenseful, or spooky. Many of the stories depend on the reader's ability to infer circumstances central to their spookiness, and I think perhaps Munby leaves too much to the reader's inference, so that one is left with an unsatisfying feeling of uncertainty. This difference between Munby and James, though, would probably only matter to one fancying herself a connoisseuse of the antiquarian ghost story. The first time I read it, I liked a couple of stories better than any of James'.