mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Well... I saw a gentleman take the book off the shelf."
"A gentleman! What.... what was he like?"
"Oh. Uh. Shortish. In a sort of cloak. Old fashioned, like a priest."
OR LIKE A VAMPIRE?!?!?!
No, actually, nothing that prosaic because this is based on an MR James story and he never dealt in such easily identifiable evils. His supernatural threats exist in the dark interstices of liminal human activity, like dusty old deserted library aisles. Or in the dust itself, swirling about in impossible eddies of dank air, looking somehow wrong. Jamesian evil intrudes via quotidian forms, and it's a feeling more than a solid object. James is like an ASMR emission of Lovecraftian horror - not the thing itself, but the sensation only - and the horror of knowing it comes for you more than the terror of the moment of reckoning.
Malevolent old men leaving their echo on the world. Why is the evil of entitled old white dudes always with us? Old people die, but this malevolence pervades - I guess it's a constant procession of horrid old bastards, one generation replacing the previous, like rows of shark's teeth proceeding neverending down into the dark of the monster's throat.