An Evening's Entertainment is a ghost story by M. R. James published in 1925 as a part of his collection 'A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories'.
M. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window, ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense. Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book, Lost Hearts, The Mezzotint, The Ash-tree, Number 13, Count Magnus, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad', The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, A School Story, The Rose Garden, The Tractate Middoth, Casting the Runes, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, Martin's Close, Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance, A Warning to the Curious