The New York Magician by J.B. Zimmerman

Hey, here’s a new novel — brand-spankin’ new, actually — that I think you’re gonna love.

The novel — well, really more of a collection of interconnected short stories — follows the exploits of Michel Wibert, a lifelong New Yorker working in the finance industry. But his real job is in communications. You see, Michel is able to see and speak to the gods, spirits, and magical beings who call the Big Apple home. His grandmother taught him about the city’s secret residents, and he now uses this knowledge to negotiate and bargain his way across New York, offering some of these beings their own lost possessions, some vital information, and many the one thing they crave the most — a friendly, sympathetic ear.

So Michel ends up meeting everyone from Baba Yaga (dishing drinks in a trendy bar), Cthulhu (hangin’ in the sewers), Malsumis (an evil Algonquian god), Hapi (the friendly god of the Nile), and Shu (Hapi’s much less friendly brother). He also encounters plenty of other interesting characters, though a bit more mundane — firemen with an unusual haunting, the Jamaican arms dealers who sell him guns, and Kevin, a big Irish immigrant who saves Michel’s bacon when he gets in over his head.

Michel himself makes a pretty interesting, distinctive character — almost always found wearing his custom enchanted Burberry coat, bandolier, pocket watch, ancient spearhead, and Desert Eagle handgun, just about his only special talents are his ability to see and talk to supernatural creatures and his lightning-quick wits. Even the few spells he can cast are tricky work-arounds using special magical items, along with the energy generated by a blast or two from his Desert Eagle. He functions as something of a hard-boiled private eye combined with a medieval knight, always looking to improve things — sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally — for the supernatural entities of NYC, as well as the everyday citizens who need him.

Verdict: A very enthusiastic thumbs up. It’s an incredible book, wildly charismatic and likable, with great glorious tons of action, excitement, mystery, humor, everything you want from great fantasy. It’s completely steeped in the feel of New York City — Zimmerman is a native of the City that Never Sleeps, and the description of the setting is close to perfect. This is perfect urban fantasy — you couldn’t separate the fantasy from the urban setting if you tried.

Characterization is a massive strong point — yes, Michel is a great character, as I’ve already said, but everyone else we meet is a great character, too. Baba Yaga has the loneliness of someone far from home, the wisdom of someone incomparably ancient, and the cruelty of, well, Baba Yaga. Malsumis is an absolute bastard and yet still intensely likable. The djinn who can’t stop switching bodies combines the desperation of someone who just wants someone he can talk to with inhuman intelligence and motives. Even Cthulhu manages to come across as someone who’d be fairly cool to have a beer with — except for the whole “vastly monstrous elder god who will drive mankind insane and destroy the Earth” thing. The humans are just as unique and fascinating, too.

I’m putting this in the strongest possible terms, people. This is an outstanding book, and I think you should read it. Go pick it up.

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Wait a minute, Max Allan Collins never wrote “The Seduction of the Innocent“! That was the infamous anti-comics screed by psychologist Fredric Wertham! Max Allan Collins is a mystery writer and the creator of the “Road to Perdition” graphic novel! What kinda funny business am I tryin’ to pull here?!?

Settle down, youngster. This is indeed a book by the prolific Collins, as part of his Jack and Maggie Starr series of mysteries. In this series, Maggie Starr is a former burlesque performer who inherited her late husband’s comics syndicate, and her stepson Jack Starr is a part-time private eye and veep of the company. The previous mysteries in this series (“A Killing in Comics” and “Strip for Murder,” neither of which I’ve read) were based on fictionalized versions of real comics creators — this one is no different.

It’s the 1950s, and comics have become big news for all the wrong reasons. Even though every kid in America (and a decent proportion of adults) is reading comic books, the Powers That Be have decided that comics are a corrupting influence, saturating their minds with violence and perversion through superhero comics, crime comics, and horror comics. Maggie and Jack run a syndicate for newspaper comic strips, but even they are feeling some of the heat, and it’s a lot worse for publishers and creators at the comic book companies. And just about all of them have a reason to hate Dr. Werner Frederick, the psychologist behind the attacks on comics. But does someone hate him enough to commit murder? Well, of course, they do. Now Jack has to track down the killer as quickly as possible to make sure the damaging publicity won’t prove equally fatal to the comics biz.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I used to be a complete mystery fanatic in my younger years, mostly Agatha Christie books in my teens, Raymond Chandler hardboiled detective novels in my 20s. And this novel was a nice, fun blend of my childhood love of mysteries and my more recent love of comics (That usually goes the other way around, doesn’t it?).

The characters are pretty keen. Jack and Maggie are both pretty appealing characters — Maggie is probably made more interesting because she’s used pretty sparingly in the story. Jack makes an interesting hero, too — he’s a fairly traditional hard-boiled detective — well, not too hard-boiled, I guess — he doesn’t drink, he’s not particularly over-violent, he’s got pretty modern sensibilities. But mixed in with that noir-style detective is a guy who’s part businessman and part comics afficianado. He’s not really a comics geek — he doesn’t collect comics or get very obsessive about the hobby. But he knows all the artists and writers and publishers and clearly appreciates what they do. He decorates his apartment with framed comic art. That combination of private eye and comics connoisseur makes for a hero who’s offbeat enough to be fun to read about.

Other characters? Well, the fun bit here is that they’re all fictional versions of people like Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, Al Williamson, Charles Biro, Bob Wood, Tarpe Mills, and others. Some of them are a lot more fictionalized than others, and some of them act out actual events that their real-world counterparts took part in. EC Comics publisher Gaines’ disastrous testimony before Congress, in particular, is fairly cringe-inducing to read about in the novel because we comics fans know just how badly it all turned out.

Plot-wise? It’s a good solid mystery. It’s even got some elements of Agatha Christie’s drawing room mysteries, just because Frederick’s murder is so thoroughly unusual. All the potential suspects could’ve done it, and there are plenty of plot convolutions, twists, and guest villains to keep most readers guessing.

This isn’t a real long novel, and it reads fast anyway, so it’ll feel like you’re done with it in record time.

I thought it was a pretty cool story, and hey, any mystery that has someone putting Dr. Fredric Wertham on ice has gotta be good fun for comics fans. Go pick it up.

Where’s My Shoggoth? by Ian Thomas and Adam Bolton

Here’s a book published by Archaia Entertainment, publishers of excellent comics like Mouse Guard, Return of the Dapper Men, Cow Boy, Rust, Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand, and plenty of others. But I this isn’t really a comic book. I’m going to call it a children’s book. And really, I almost passed this one by entirely, until I noticed one little thing on the back cover that hooked itself into my intrigue gland:

It’s classified as horror. And it’s rated “E” for everyone.

Can you have a kid-friendly all-ages horror book?

Let’s find out.

There’s very little plot here, not that you need a lot. A young boy goes out one night to play with his pet shoggoth, only to discover that it’s broken out of its pen and gotten lost. He sets out to look for it, accompanied by a cute black kitten, and encounters a host of monsters and deities from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos — but none of them are my shoggoth! Where is my shoggoth?!

The story is told in poetic verse — really, a bit of child-like doggerel — and illustrated in gorgeous, detailed artwork that’s simultaneously adorable, creepy, and hilarious. I hope I can be forgiven for posting the rhymes from the page featuring the monstrous aquatic Deep Ones as an example:

What’s this? Is this my shoggoth?
It has great googly eyes.
Its toes have webs between them,
and it’s heaving heavy sighs.
It says it loves my sister,
and would like to ask her out.
So it can’t have met my sister…
all my sister does is shout!

I’m not going to try to reprint any of the artwork here. There’s so much detail on every page, I can’t imagine it scanning very well.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I loved this book so much, and I’m so glad I got it. If you’re a grownup who enjoys Lovecraftian horror and Lovecraftian humor, this is something you are probably going to want to have on your bookshelf.

Is it going to be something you’ll want for your kids? Well, obviously, every kid is different. If you’re lucky enough to have a kid who loves monsters (six-year-old me waves to the crowd), they’re going to really like this book, because it’s stuffed full of monsters, all depicted in a decent degree of (non-gory) detail. It’s got dark corners, cobwebs, tentacles reaching from the attic, spooky lights, monstrous mansions, and everything else monster-loving kids like. If you’ve got kids whose idea of edgy reading material is “Pat the Bunny,” they may not appreciate it very much. They might be bored, they might be scared, hard to say… but you know your kids and what they’d like better than I do, right?

No matter whether you get it for yourself or your kids, you’ll probably want to read it with a magnifying glass on hand. There are wonderful scary/hilarious images scattered throughout every page, and you won’t want to miss out on any of them.

Anything else? The cover glows in the dark, and there’s a “Chutes and Ladders” style game on the book’s endpages called “Stairs and Tentacles.”

I think you’ll like it. Go pick it up.

Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher

The second novel by British writer Adam Christopher is actually more of a pure superhero story than his first one was. This one is set in the city of San Ventura, the only place in the world where there’s still a functioning superteam — the Seven Wonders — because it’s the only city where a supervillain — the diabolical Cowl — still operates.

We’ve got a pretty wide collection of characters to follow. There’s Tony Prosdocimi, working class schlub, who suddenly finds himself gaining superpowers; his somewhat mysterious girlfriend Jeannie; the Cowl himself, perplexed by the slow loss of his own powers; Blackbird, the Cowl’s sidekick; Sam Millar and Joe Milano, hard-working cops on the Cowl’s trail; and the Seven Wonders themselves: the powerful leader Aurora, the telepathic Bluebell, the speedster Linear, the alien powerhouse Dragon Star, the godlike technologist Hephaestus, his robotic creation SMART, and the shapeshifting warrior Sand Cat.

Once Tony discovers his powers, he becomes obsessed with becoming a hero, so he can defeat the Cowl and confront the Seven Wonders about their negligence in dealing with the murderous villain. At the same time, the Cowl is following a scheme to get his hands on a weapon so powerful and destructive that the Seven Wonders hid it and then made themselves forget where it was. And there’s an even more dire threat looming on the horizon — a crisis so dire it will force heroes and villains to unite to try to stop it.

There’s not a lot more I can tell without giving away spoilers. But I will note that more than one character switches sides, from good to bad, and from bad to good. Lots of people die — and some of them even come back from the dead.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a good, rollicking story, excellent action, mystery, and intrigue, and it reads pretty dang fast — it’s real easy to keep the pages turning.

Characterization is, at times, very good. Some of the characters are very interesting and well-created. Others are contradictory — several of the characters who switch sides appear to have done so just so the plot could have some characters who switched sides. While it keeps the plot moving, it can be very jarring. “Well, I was a good guy — time to embrace monstrous evil!” And some of the characters seem just barely sketched-in — they seem to be there to fill a spot on the stage, to help with battles, or to die somewhat dramatically.

It’s also a bit of a shock when our viewpoint character completely exits the story for about a third of the book.

I guess this is a certain amount of nitpicking, because, like I said, I did enjoy the book quite a bit. But I also wished I’d enjoyed it a little bit more…

Still, certainly worth reading for fans of superhero fiction. Go pick it up.

The Friday Society by Adrienne Kress

So here’s this fun little novel I stumbled across — it’s set around the turn of the century in London and stars three young women with interesting talents and general dissatisfaction with the way their lives are working out. Cora is a scientific and engineering genius who is frustrated that her boss, an MP and a genius in his own right, doesn’t seem to appreciate all she does. Nellie is an assistant for a famous magician, and while he does appreciate and support her, she dreams of having her own adventures. Michiko is a young Japanese woman, superbly trained as a samurai, but with limited skills in English and yoked to an abusive egomaniac.

What brings them together, besides random chance, is a villain — an ominous, powerful foe known as the Fog — who’s roaming the streets at night murdering prominent gentlemen and innocent flower girls, breaking into the Tower of London to steal the Crown Jewels, and eventually staging a daring and destructive attack on the entire city. The police are helpless, the greatest men in the nation are clueless, so what hope can we expect from a girl trained in the construction of steampunk weaponry, another girl who knows more about sleight-of-hand, trickery, acrobatics, and thievery than anyone else in the city, and another girl who is one of the most skilled martial artists in the nation? And if they know that their actions could have serious repercussions, what sort of disguises will they devise to protect themselves?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m not normally all that big on steampunk — I love it in theory, but it often doesn’t live up to my expectations. Still, I loved the stuffings out of this book — partly because it wasn’t entirely a steampunk story. You can’t expect a lot of faithfully rendered Victorian/Edwardian attitude — it’s really very anachronistic, as all three of our main characters generally talk and act like modern-day women. Honestly, I think that’s fine — this was designed as a young adult novel, specifically to appeal to girls, so I don’t see any problem with having our characters think like more modern women.

Which brings us to our characters themselves — Cora, Nellie, and Michiko are all total winners as characters. Cora brings the frustrated snark along with the brainy science, Nellie is part girly-girl, part swashbuckler, all enthusiasm, and Michiko is controlled, quiet, and generally confused by almost everything Cora and Nellie do. And they all work together really well. They all get individual moments to shine, and they all get moments where they shine as a team. They even get moments where they fail to shine, just to show that their not perfect, unstoppable heroes.

I am fairly impressed that Kress specifically planned to have Nellie be the character most fond of stereotypically girly pursuits, primarily for the sake of realism — plenty of girls like dresses and shoes and sparkles while still being awesome, so it makes good sense to give them their own character.

The action’s great, the mystery is fun, the plot twists are entertaining. I suppose I should’ve figured out what kind of disguises they were going to come up with, but I didn’t, so that added to the fun, too.

If I’ve got a criticism, I’d say I wish Michiko had known a bit more English. There were too many scenes that featured Cora and Nellie talking to each other while Michiko stood by silently. But hopefully, that will be less of a problem in the sequels (and I hope there are sequels on the way).

It’s a good book. Go pick it up.

Wearing the Cape: Villains Inc. by Marion G. Harmon

The third consecutive novel in the “Wearing the Cape” series (technically, it was written second, with the previously reviewed “Big Easy Nights” written to bridge the gap between the first novel and this one) continues the story of newbie superhero Hope “Astra” Corrigan.

Astra has now completed her training and is a more effective superhero than ever, but after the events of the first novel, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. And since her relationship with the late Atlas has been revealed, her popularity has plummeted. The Sentinels have plenty of problems of their own, too — with several of their most prominent members dead, they have to bring in new members quickly. And there’s a prediction that the team’s leader, the magic-wielding Blackstone, is going to be killed. And worst of all, Chicago is gripped by a metahuman crime wave as a group called Villains Inc. starts a war on organized crime, the Sentinels, the police, and the police, and anyone else who gets in their way.

There are also plenty of changes for two of Hope’s friends — Jacky “Artemis” Bouchard, reluctant vampire vigilante, back from New Orleans, learns what happens when a vampire gets hit by a powerful healing spell, and Shelly (Hope’s old friend from high school, who’d killed herself in an attempt to give herself superpowers and then been resurrected as an artificial intelligence — she lives inside Hope’s head and serves as her in-the-field crisis dispatcher) sees her role in the Sentinels organization develop in greater ways.

So will the Sentinels be able to track the spellcaster behind Villains Inc.? Will they be able to save Blackstone? Can they keep from getting wrecked by Villains Inc. and everyone else coming out of the woodwork to attack them? And how is Astra going to handle going toe-to-toe with a villain who’s even more powerful than she is?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’ve read a lot of superhero novels, and I’ve liked an awful lot of them. And I really do think Harmon’s “Wearing the Cape” series is the gold standard that all other superhero novels should aspire to. Seriously, it’s better than “Soon I Will Be Invincible,” which is a heck of a good novel.

I love the characters — Hope, Jacky, Shelly, the Bees, Hope’s parents, Rush, Blackstone, Detective Fisher, Lei Zi, and all the rest. I love the action — bruising, brutal, terrible, thrilling. I love the drama and suspense and the vast amounts of humor.

And I love the attention to detail and realism — there are plenty of ideas here about how superheroes and supervillains would affect laws, culture, the media, and more. And even better, all that realism doesn’t make it a grim, unappealing story, like so many other “realistic” superhero stories. It’s still enormous fun to read, and to re-read.

Seriously, the story starts with Astra fighting Godzilla — or at least a godzilla. And it just gets better from there.

It’s a great story. Go pick it up.

Trick ‘r Treat

Just a day left ’til the best day of the year, so let’s get one more review done — namely for this, the best horror movie about Halloween ever made.

“Trick ‘r Treat” is a movie that many of you have never seen and many have never even heard of. Thank the studio for that — it was finished and in the can, but got held back for two whole years ’til it was finally released direct-to-DVD. What can you say — sometimes, the studios are dumber’n stumps.

The film was written and directed by Michael Dougherty and produced by Bryan Singer. The stars included Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, and scads of others.

So what’ve we got here? It’s a good old-fashioned horror anthology — four different stories, all taking place in the same town on the same Halloween night. All of the stories are based around various important Halloween traditions — don’t blow out a jack-o-lantern before midnight, wear a costume, give candy to trick-or-treaters, and check your candy before you eat it — and about the dangers that can befall you if you break those traditions.

We get stories about a young couple — one a Halloween fan, the other a Halloween hater. We get a school principal who has some unusual holiday traditions to share with students. We get a bunch of kids playing a prank on an awkward friend and what they learn about the urban legend of the Halloween School Bus Massacre. We get a young woman hoping to lose her virginity on Halloween. We get the cantankerous old man who hates Halloween and how he deals with a persistent trick-or-treater. And wrapped in and around these stories is one recurring character — Sam, a little kid wearing a tacky orange clown suit and an ugly, ominous burlap sack over his head.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This isn’t the scariest movie in the world — in fact, it’s really fairly tame, as horror movies go. Not to say it doesn’t have its share of scary moments — but this movie doesn’t aspire to be “The Exorcist.” This one is basically a nice little love letter to Halloween.

It’s probably more accurate to call this a horror-comedy, as it has a lot of funny or at least morbidly funny moments. Probably the funniest episode is the one focusing on the principal, though that one has some really outstanding tension. All the rest have some great humor in them, just enough to give you a short break from the scares. Probably the most purely terrifying episode is the one featuring the Halloween School Bus Massacre, which mostly sets the humor aside in favor of giving you nightmares.

And the setting and mood help make this one a winner, too. This is set in a small Ohio town that manages to have the best dang Halloween celebrations I’ve ever seen, complete with huge, anarchic street festivals, costumed marching bands, people who decorate their yards with scarecrows and hordes of jack-o-lanterns, and more kids out trick-or-treating than I’ve seen in at least a decade. This is what I wish every Halloween could be like (minus the supernatural murders, of course), and watching it really hits you in the nostalgia-bone.

It’s a fantastic movie. Rent it, stream it, buy it, whatever you gotta do.

The Haunting

I’ll come right out and say it — in my opinion, this is the best and most frightening horror movie ever made. I don’t know why it isn’t better known….

Anyway, this one was released in 1963 (There was a remake in 1999. Don’t watch it. It’s not good.), produced and directed by Robert Wise. The script was written by Nelson Gidding, based on the novel “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson. The stars included Julie Harris as the frightfully nervous Eleanor Lance, Claire Bloom as hip lesbian Theodora, Richard Johnson as level-headed parapsychologist Dr. John Markway, and Russ Tamblyn as skeptical rich kid Luke Sanderson.

The plot involves Dr. Markway inviting a small group of people to Hill House, a notorious haunted house, in an attempt to prove the existence of ghosts. Hill House is not the sort of haunted house that brings headless spirits, levitating candelabra, or ladies in white — it’s a malevolent house, seemingly alive and capable of its own devious thoughts. It manifests itself as cold spots, unpleasant smells, and doors that are hinged just barely off-center, so they never stay open or closed for very long.

In the daylight, Hill House seems almost sane, but in the night, in the dark, it conspires to separate people, slams invisible cannonballs down the hallways, and giggles, moans, screams, weeps. Whatever walks there may walk alone, but it doesn’t want to be alone — it wants company in its madness, and it ruthlessly exploits every weakness to get what it wants.

Eleanor soon finds herself as the focus of the house’s obsessions — but we can’t tell if she’s really that upset by the attention. She’s emotionally unstable, desperate for friends and acceptance, but wracked by guilt because she thinks she may have let her elderly, overbearing mother die. And Hill House offers her a place where she’ll be loved and accepted forever — granted, she’d be surrounded by the mad cackling and shrieks of the dead, but maybe she really wants to be the center of all that attention.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Like I said, my very favorite horror movie. It doesn’t look like much — it’s in black and white, it doesn’t have a lot of big-name stars, and incredibly, it has almost no special visual effects. It accomplishes almost all of this wonderful terror with great cinematography and amazing sound effects. The mood, the creepiness, the genuine fear are all there in spades.

I know, I know, it doesn’t have monsters crawling through the walls, it doesn’t have chainsaws, it doesn’t have pea-soup vomit, it doesn’t have buckets of gore, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that everyone expects from horror films. It’s quiet, it’s subtle, it gets under your skin, it grabs that part of your brain that wakes up after nightmares and wants to cower underneath the blanket because this time it really might be real.

If you love horror movies and you haven’t yet seen this one, you owe it to yourself to watch it. Go find it, pop it into the DVD player, and find out what it’s all about. It’s almost Halloween, and you deserve some truly excellent scares.

The 13th Hour by the Midnight Syndicate

When you love Halloween the way I do, you end up collecting just about anything you can that’s horror-related. Books, comics, art (well, not much art — that’s expensive), movies, and even music — I’ve got a pretty phenomenally great collection of spooky-themed music, everything from movie soundtracks, old country songs, and experimental classical music to Rob Zombie, Oingo Boingo, and the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets to Tom Waits, Roky Erickson, and Jonathan Coulton. But I think I’ve got the most complete albums by a group called the Midnight Syndicate.

The Syndicate specializes in horror movie soundtracks, usually for movies that don’t actually exist. They’re classified as goth instrumental, or dark ambient, or ethereal wave — it all breaks down to horror movies soundtracks, usually for movies that don’t actually exist. How’s that work? They basically pick a theme — vampires, insane asylums, evil carnivals, what have you — and then they put together some symphonic music scores, combined with a nice dose of sound effects, to come up with something plenty creepy.

They tend to get the most play right around Halloween. Partly because of the horror movie soundtrack stuff — partly because they let haunted attractions use their music without licensing fees. So if you’ve got a haunted house, haunted hayride, or haunted theme park in your area, there’s a decent chance that they’re playing Midnight Syndicate’s music while they’re scaring the pants off you.

My personal favorite of their albums is “The 13th Hour” which is about a trip through the haunted mansion of the evil Haverghast family. You start out with a short walk in the woods in the middle of the night when you come upon the old deserted house, open the door, and walk inside. From there, you get a musical tour through the mansion’s glories and horrors, through the lushly outfitted drawing room to the grimy basement to the family mausoleum. The ghosts you meet range from unnerving heavy breathers and moaners to more traditional ghosts all the way up to something that tries to tear the house down around your ears. Are you going to be able to escape? Or will you be spending the rest of eternity wandering these dark hallways?

Samples? I’m not giving you many — but “Fallen Grandeur” is a really good one. “Living Walls” is wonderfully creepy. “Grisly Reminder” is quiet and spooky. And “Hand in Hand Again” does great things with just an old record player and a few rumbling sound effects.

Verdict: A very enthusiastic thumbs up. This is almost perfect Halloween mood music. Pop this in the player while you’re doing housework, reading a book, surfing the web, driving to work, writing scary stories, waiting for trick-or-treaters, or anything else, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to start feeling the Halloween spirit.

It’s a wonderful, dark, ominous, ghost-filled album. I like almost all of Midnight Syndicate’s stuff, but this is definitely my fave. Go pick it up.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James

This is probably the oldest book I’m ever going to review, but I’m gonna do it partly because this is one of my favorite books of scary stories ever and partly because not nearly enough people know and love this book.

“Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” was published back in 1904 and was the first collection of British writer and scholar M.R. James’ classic ghost stories, which included:

• “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book”
• “Lost Hearts”
• “The Mezzotint”
• “The Ash-Tree”
• “Number 13″
• “Count Magnus”
• “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’”
• “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”

James’ stories, though sometimes spectacularly wordy to modern readers, were generally meant to be read aloud during Christmas celebrations — an old Victorian tradition had party-goers telling each other ghost stories at Christmas.

James’ protagonists all seem to share common traits — unassuming scholars with a high level of interest in antiquarianism — in other words, looking at old stuff. Heck, James pretty much invented the concept of the “antiquarian ghost story” — anyone who’s written anything similar in the decades since owes James a debt of gratitude.

The stereotypical beginning of the story would involve the main character having a fortnight or month-long holiday and traveling to some out-of-the-way, rural location to look at old churches. Either he’d be staying at a local inn or with an acquaintance — often someone who had a fantastically awesome library. After a few days of traipsing over the countryside, the protagonist finds himself exposed to supernatural forces — what kind of forces are rarely made explicit.

The previous paragraph probably sounds like I don’t like James’ stories, but I do, enormously. They’re predictable in some ways, but it’s a very enjoyable, comfortable kind of predictability. It’s enjoyably nostalgic to remember that people used to write these incredibly long and detailed descriptions of scenery, that amateur scholars used to be able to take long holidays just to go out in the country and look for old stuff, that people used to sit down and write letters so long and detailed that you could bind a few of them and sell them as books.

Even better than the joy of the setting, language, and mood, however, are the scares. James packs some damn good ones in here. His specialty is the off-camera fright — he suggests awful things and lets the reader fill in the blanks. Not that he backs away from more overt terrors — once the quiet stuff has done its work, James knows when to unleash the gory murders and the shrieks on the moors.

The book features a number of James’ best-known tales, including “‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” (note the extra quotation marks — James was quoting a line from a Robert Burns poem) — a story that actually manages to make the stereotypical bedsheet ghost legitimately scary. There’s also “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook,” a narrative, believed to be James’ very first ghost story, about an evil piece of artwork; “Lost Hearts,” a tale of experimentation and bloody murder; “The Mezzotint,” about an engraving that tells its own ghost story; “Number 13,” about a very unlucky and very strange hotel room; “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” in which a treasure hunter cracks a code that he thinks will lead to riches; and “The Ash-Tree,” a story about a witch’s curse and something horrible hidden inside an old tree.

This book was followed in 1911 by its sequel, sometimes called “More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary,” but really just called “More Ghost Stories.” The two books are sometimes combined into a single volume.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I do recommend this book highly, but I’ll warn you that it can be a bit of an uphill slog. Like a lot of older books, the writing can seem very dated and archaic. Part of this is a difference in writing styles, but I think James was also cultivating this, too — he was a dedicated antiquarian and academic himself, writing about other dedicated antiquarians and academics.

James nearly never translates the Latin passages in his stories, because of course, a university don would be fairly fluent in Latin. He overwrites his descriptions, partly because that was the style of the time, partly because he liked to draw readers in and make them comfortable before he started unleashing the spooks and goblins.

In the end, what makes this book really cool is the fact that, not only did James invent and perfect the literary ghost story, but he’s still considered the absolute master of that style — every horror writer from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King and beyond has read and loved — and probably emulated — James’ stories.

“Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” is mostly out of copyright, so is available in many places online, but you should pick up a print copy, ’cause it’s still cool to own books.