Wrote a deep-dive piece on what ghost story master M.R. James can teach us about writing horror stories.
https://alecworley.substack.com/p/mr-james-and-the-craft-of-fear
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook was the one that scared the willies out me when I was a kid. I think I even used to avoid the shelf where the book was kept. I had to read it several times over the years just to dull its impact.
The thing was, at a young age I sometimes hardly knew what I was reading, and that wasn't just down to the Latin bits. James did oblique horror. Explanations were few and sparse. But that meant that my imagination was free to fill in the gaps with all manner of awfulness.