retribution and malice

I just finished the Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James — the first time, I think, I’ve read them all in one go, though over the years I’ve read most of them several times. James calls them “ghost stories,” though as far as I can tell only one of them (“A Neighbour’s Landmark”) features a ghost — if we distinguish, as I think we should, a ghost (a disembodied though possibly visible dead person) from a revenant (a reanimated corpse). In James the revenant is the norm, along with demons, which usually bear some kind of half-human half-animal appearance, like the creatures in The Island of Doctor Moreau (which I wonder if James knew). As Adam Roberts writes in a forthcoming review of a new James biography, “there’s rarely anything spectral or evanescent about James’s hauntings: they almost always possess a hideous physicality, a solidity, palpability and presence.” Precisely. A great many fearful things in James’s stories are hairy, and most of them have mouths. And consider this…