Robert Lloyd Parry: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
This special twentieth Bury Me… features grand panjandrum and actor Robert Lloyd Parry, the man behind the Nunkie Theatre Company, responsible for many an uneasy evening with the master of English supernatural stories…
“There are works of fiction I’ve enjoyed as much as M R James’s ghost stories, but few, I think, that I’ve enjoyed more. Certainly none have played so unexpectedly large a part in my life. I think that I first came across MRJ in a paperback edition of the Collected Stories belonging to my dad, when I was 13 or so. But the book I’d like to be buried with is a first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [1904]. (I don’t own a copy incidentally – the readers of this will have to club together in time for the funeral. No flowers, please).
Of the eight stories in this, his first collection, I would count six as absolutely first rate, and rank the remaining two alongside the best work of other Edwardian supernaturalists. Five of them, and a later story – A Warning to the Curious – form what I now call the M R James Trilogy, a set of one man shows in which I take on the role of the author telling spook tales in his Cambridge study, circa 1904.
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