At Corner Store, M.R. James's Ghost Stories Are Brought Back to Life

Robert Lloyd Parry, itinerant British performer and learned devotee of ghost stories, hopes Washington audiences love a good supernatural tale. Or that they at least have a good healthy fear of them.

Parry, who performs tonight in the restored 19th-century rowhouse called Corner Store near Eastern Market, bases his one-man show on the ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, the British writer who is esteemed as a master of the genre. (Oh, and did we mention the rowhouse at Ninth and South Carolina Avenue SE, according to its owners, was once the site of a murder?)

In his show, Parry tries to channel James, who wrote his peculiarly disturbing stories to be read aloud and who made a ritual of reading a new one to friends and colleagues at Cambridge University every year. Dressed like an Edwardian don, working by candlelight, Parry dramatically narrates a pair of stories for audiences very similar to how the author did.

"People do still find M.R. James scary," says Parry, 37. "I wonder if he doesn't tap into some deep-seated fears. I mean, reduced to their most basic, James's stories are about a very familiar world into which something monstrous breaks through momentarily. I suppose anyone could have that fear."

Parry's piece is not entirely original. In the 1980s, the BBC broadcast actor Robert Powell did readings of James's stories. But unlike Powell -- and James, for the matter -- Parry doesn't read from manuscripts, having memorized the tales. His storytelling, which he has toured successfully, has developed a cult following in the United Kingdom, and even netted him a Hamilton Deane award from the Dracula Society.

"Most readers today probably don't know James," Parry says, "but there is a large minority that still does." In England, he's never been out of print since his first published collection in 1904. "And I've never known anyone who's read him and not liked him. To read him is to be very fond of him indeed."

Parry first encountered James's stories courtesy of his father, who gave him a collection more than 20 years ago. "I was into Sherlock Holmes at the time, so it fit right in." But the tales didn't have an enduring effect until after he'd finished studying classics at Oxford and found himself working at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

"After working there a couple years, I learned James had been the museum director around 1900 when he first wrote stories," Parry says. A medieval scholar who worked on rare manuscripts, James was widely known and respected. In the museum, he had an office -- essentially a Victorian library -- where he likely wrote some of his stories and definitely read them aloud to a coterie of other scholars.

"There are descriptions of the readings that, after chapel, drinks would be flowing in his room, all his mates were there, and he'd come in with a sheaf of manuscripts and blow out all candles except one -- then just sit reading his story," Parry says.

Re-reading the stories, Parry was struck by James's elegant and slightly archaic prose; the authoritative use of historical and scholarly facts; the casual, seemingly mundane world that gradually -- then suddenly -- becomes creepy, menacing.

As in "Casting the Runes," when a man can't sleep because of odd sounds in his house. He decides to check the time by reaching for the watch under his pillow. But he finds something else, James writes: "What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being."

"James said reticence was most important thing in a ghost story," Parry says. "Something is always being held back or happening just out of eyeshot." But James, who believed ghosts should be "odious and malevolent," ultimately delivers.