Description:
"If there is anything about which the present generation is bewilderingly well-informed it is the subject of spooks." - "Seraphita"
Friends and Spectres is a companion volume to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020), an anthology of ghost stories by authors who had been members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club along with M. R. James. Here the associations with MRJ are less formal, but stronger and more enduring: for it is the bond of genuine friendship that ties these writers to him.
The majority of pieces here were originally published under pseudonyms, and over half appeared first in amateur magazines or local newspapers. All deal with the supernatural, and several of the stories are themselves spectres-or more properly "revenants", only now re-emerging into the light after decades of oblivion. There are rediscoveries here of "lost" tales by Arthur Reed Ropes, E. G. Swain, and the enigmatic "B."
Brief description: Robert Lloyd Parry is a performance storyteller and writer. In 2005 he began what he now refers to as "The M. R. James Project", with a solo performance of "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" and "The Mezzotint" in MRJ's old office in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Project has since encompassed seven one-man theatre shows, several films and audiobooks, three documentaries, a guided walk, and numerous magazine articles. For Swan River Press he has edited Friends and Spectres (2024), Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020), and Curfew and other Eerie Tales by Lucy M. Boston (2011).
Review Quotes:
"[Ghosts of the Chit-Chat] is now complemented by the equally elegant Friends and Spectres, spotlighting work by participants in a Cambridge University debate on the existence of ghosts. James supported the case for the spectral." - Washington Post
"All credit to Robert Lloyd Parry for not merely assembling a worthwhile anthology, but adding plenty of biographical material to help flesh out the characters behind the fiction." - Supernatural Tales