Because James’s plots are so often set on the rainy coasts of England, in ruined monasteries in the Pyrenees or in airy cathedrals, and also because so many of his narrators and protagonists come from the stiff-upper-lip school of emotionally constrained English Protestantism, his stories have been accused of being lifeless. Lacking in either big or little “r” romance and almost exclusively devoid of love interests or the beasts of passion, James’s oeuvre is much like the man himself. Called “Monty” by the few who knew him well, James was the son of an Anglican curate, and after winning a scholarship to Eton, he would go on to make a life in academia without worldly interruption. His chosen field too required a lonely dedication to dead subjects, and as the master of an all boys’ school, James’s suspended adolescence was exacerbated. Lytton Strachey, the English historian and critic who founded the influential Bloomsbury Group, was no great fan of James’s work; his most damning critique came when he remarked that “It’s odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.”

While some of James’s stories run into the realm of unbelievable caricature, he was, if anything, a mature talent, not a composer of magical tales for school boys. And while a story like “Lost Hearts” is built upon re-imagining adult evil from the vantage point of a child, a majority of James’s ghost stories are about older, single individuals who confront even older frights, many of whom are more than just ghosts. In the classic “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” a vacationing professor stumbles across a whistle carrying a Latin inscription in a Knights Templar preceptory, and upon testing the instrument, he accidentally calls back into the world the malevolent spirit of one the long-dead knights. In other tales, monsters more frightening than ghosts appear, such as in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” which contains a devilish, hirsute beast-man, while “Casting the Runes” features an alchemist who attempts to summon a demon in order to smite his professional enemies.

A solitary bachelor and bibliophile, James was the quintessential writer-as-hermit. He was a man who sought out older times all the while remaining mostly aloof to the rapid changes around him. Because of this, his stories are at once timeless and completely foreign. Even among other horror writers, most of whom cultivated a similar air of eccentricity, James lived as he wrote, and he remains the undisputed king of hushed horrors.