Ghosts on the Cam

Presenting my latest cover illustration for Swan River Press, and another story collection edited by Robert Lloyd Parry: Ghosts on the Cam is the third in a series of linked anthologies. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020) collected supernatural tales by members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club, of which MR James was a leading light. Friends and Spectres (2024) looked more widely at works by MRJ’s friends outside the club. In the present volume the authors’ personal connections with MRJ are less strong, though his literary influence is just as powerfully felt. But what really binds the tales collected together here is the town of Cambridge itself, with its libraries and chapels and echoing cloisters, its murky river and misty streets. Many of the authors studied at Cambridge; several worked there; two were born there. In a series of introductory essays Robert Lloyd Parry looks at how and why a small market town on the edge of the Fens has produced so many writers of the…