Giving up the ghost

In Competition No. 2542 you were invited to submit a ghost story entitled ‘The Face of the Horse’. I read the entries by flickering candlelight in a bid to recreate the atmosphere of the dean’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, where M.R. James gave Christmas Eve readings of his stories to a group of friends. By all accounts these were jocular, camp occasions punctuated by laughter, pranks and abstruse jokes, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the comedy — intentional or not — in your entries; G.M. Davis’s speaking horse was a stroke of comic genius.

James’s interest in ghosts was awakened in childhood by the sight of a toy Punch & Judy set, and Brian Murdoch’s malevolent wooden rocking-horse certainly gave me the willies. I also liked his Poe-esque reference to cosmology. Equally disquieting was D.A. Prince’s slow-burn portrait of her protagonist’s mental disintegration — the understated, Jamesian approach more effective than full-on Gothic schlock-horror.