Talking Terror: An M.R. James Festival

Gladstone's Library, at Hawarden, Cheshire, has announced 'Talking Terror: An M.R. James Festival' on 27-28 November, 2026. The weekend event includes: 

Robert Lloyd Parry performing several stories of M.R. James by candlelight  

Adam Z Robinson performing The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson and chairing a live recording of The Ghost Story Book Club podcast with special guest Rosemary Pardoe (Jamesian expert, author and long-time editor of Ghosts and Scholars)

Professor Darryl Jones (author of the latest M.R. James biography) in discussion about James' stories 

I will be joining Rosemary and Adam for a discussion on 'Writing Ghost Stories Today'.  

The event takes place in the atmospheric Gothic country house, which houses over 150,000 volumes and offers several quiet reading rooms as well as elegant landscaped grounds. 

Hawarden was recommended warmly to me by the historical novelist Peter Vansittart, who would stay there at least annually while writing his books, and appreciated the combination of private study time and collegiate dining and discussion. I was therefore delighted to be invited to take part in this Jamesian weekend.

(Mark Valentine) 

  

Insidious Mechanisms: A New Anthology from Egaeus Press

  

Egaeus Press have just announced publication of a new anthology, Insidious Mechanisms, Tales of Cursed Clockwork and Cyclical Anomalies, “presenting fifteen previously unpublished short stories, set against the ticks and whirs of unfathomable devices, synchronised, in apparent mockery of the true cycles of nature and human desire.” Contributors include Charles Wilkinson, D.P. Watt, R. Ostermeier, John Gale and Colin Insole. 

 My own story, ‘Seven Clocks and a Music Box’ was inspired by a music box I bought in a curio shop in Holt, Norfolk, whose proprietor said he could not identify the tune, though it seemed familiar. I like the idea of just such an elusive melody. Then, in the back streets of a Westmorland town, I chanced upon a closed clock museum, and in a nearby antiques shop, what looked like some of its discarded books. These things began to mesh, and I then recalled I had used a clock-worker character before, in two Connoisseur stories, who could make a return. She and the narrator encounter a gallery of strange and singular clocks and discover the secret of the music box.

(Mark Valentine)