review

OH, WHISTLE, AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD – M.R. JAMES

By karen t. brissette

Posted on December 18, 2019

Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M.R. James
My rating: 4/5 cats
One Star

WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!

this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.

this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.

if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!

2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…

reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.

so, let’s begin

DECEMBER 18

Quickly as it had risen, the wind did not fall at once. On it went, moaning and rushing past the house, at times rising to a cry so desolate that, as Parkins disinterestedly said, it might have made fanciful people feel quite uncomfortable; even the unimaginative, he thought after a quarter of an hour, might be happier without it.

this was a pleasant surprise! even though this author wrote The Diary of Mr Poynter; the ‘haunted curtains*’ story that i read and enjoyed last year whilst making my way through seth’s excellent “ghost stories for christmas” series (of which three more were published this year and will be reviewed here anon), i didn’t have the highest hopes going into this one.

here’s the funny thing—i just reread my review for the haunted curtains** story, and this is one of the things i said:

…it is a whole lot better than i thought it was going to be. i’d always kind of lumped m.r. james in with algernon blackwood in my mind as “contemporaneous english writers of dry and boring ghost stories that do not scare me one bit.”

and all of that holds up except for the “boring” part. this story was funny and pretty modern, not at all the stuffy atmospheric “mayyyyyybe it’s a ghost but maybe it’s maaaaadnessss” kind of thing i was expecting.

that is what i thought A YEAR AGO, and apparently i forgot all about what i learned from reading that story, because that is what i felt THIS MORNING, as i sat down to read this story, and was AGAIN struck by the modernity of the tone and the humor and the playfulness. not scary, because i am as brave as i am forgetful, but a great story, and if seth ever starts repeating authors in that series, i hope he chooses this one.