Most ghost stories are about terror and fear.

M. R. James understood that horror is something different.

Terror is all about anticipation.

Fear belongs to the moment itself: the sudden noise, the glimpse of a figure, the thing seen at the edge of the candlelight.

Horror? That arrives later, when the moment has passed but refuses to leave you.

“If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.”

It’s a very Jamesian line. The terror is what happened in the night. The horror is the knowledge that it cannot be forgotten.

And so many of his supernatural antagonists are revenants: ancient grimoires, forgotten legends, memories of something evil which have refused to stay unremembered.

I first read James years ago, but along with Susan Hill’s ‘The Woman In Black’, I find myself returning to his stories every winter. Perhaps that’s because his ghosts linger where the best stories often linger: not on the page, but in the imagination after the book has been closed.

Over to you: tell me about the books and stories which haunt you.

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Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.