"Dr James has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples."¹

"The Count Magus" influence:

One of the most popular M. R. James short stories is without a doubt “Count Magus.” After embarking on the Black Pilgrimage, and rest assured, this was no humanitarian endeavor, the Count returns with a very mysterious, yet handy, or should I say “tentacally,” companion who begins to do the Count’s dirty work. Who, or better yet, what was this mysterious companion of Count Magus? Here is a description:

The figure was unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which projected from the shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish.

Even after the Count has died, men trespassing on his land to hunt end up dead or having gone quite mad thanks to good Brother Tentacles. Here is the fate of one of these men:

And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.

Any of this sound familiar (no pun intended)?

Take a look at The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost, page 67:

"Suddenly the professor stopped talking. He was staring at a statue that stood in a niche on the front of the temple. It was a statue of a short, hunched figure in a monk's robe. The hood of the robe was large, and hung down over the creature's face, but you could see something dangling from one long, drooping sleeve. It looked like an octopus's tentacle."

And then again at on page 106:

"It was short and stooped, and it wore a robe with a hood…Tentacles reached out from the long sleeves."

And let us not forget:

"Lying on the grass was the body of a small collie dog. It was dead. There was not much doubt about that. All the flesh had been sucked away from the dog’s head, leaving only a bleached white skull.(RWG 69)

"The Tractate Middoth" influence:

There is another short story by M. R. James entitled “The Tractate Middoth” in which we find a very familiar looking creature:

"I tell you, he had a very nasty bald head. It looked to me dry, and it looked dusty, and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs…Though, for one reason or another I didn’t take in the lower part of his face I did see the upper part; and it was perfectly dry, and the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bones there were cobwebs—thick.

Does this charming fellow sound familiar?

"He (Anthony) was staring at a man, a short man in a long black overcoat with tattered edges. The man’s pale, freckled head was bald, and his eyes were small, cruel, and beady. Across the man’s face stretched a crisscrossing mass of black strands—they looked like spider webs.

Now if these fellows aren't at least related, I'm a monkey's uncle. Later in The Tractate Middoth, we here about the curious burial of a Dr. Rant:

"He left directions—horrid old man!—that he was to be put, sitting at a table in his ordinary clothes, in a brick room that he’d had made underground in a field near his house.

In a newspaper clipping form the Minneapolis Tribune we learn about how a very bizarre mock funeral for Willis Nightwood was held:

"This mock funeral was performed according to instructions left in the old lawyer’s will: It [a scarecrow] was then taken to an underground room that had been constructed during Mr. Nightwood’s lifetime. The room is solidly built of bricks and mortar, and lies thirty feet underground beneath a hill on Mr. Nightwood’s property…the scarecrow was carried down a long sloping ramp to the brick room and was then taken from its coffin and propped up in a sitting position in a chair.(LWT 47-48)

The "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" influence:

Jean Anderson once had lunch with John Bellairs to talk about children's books, as she was writing one at the time and wanted to hear his views on the subject. During this meeting she mentioned the similarities between M.R. James story "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and a scene in "The Face in the Frost", specifically the empty garment in the wizard's cellar that takes on a life of its own John admitted there was a definite connection between the two stories and that she was the only one who had ever pointed it out to him.

The protagonist of "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad," a one Professor Parkins, literally stumbles on the remains of an ancient Templar lodge and manages to dig up a curious whistle, a whistle as it turns out, possessing terrible powers of summoning. Throwing caution to the wind, Parkins eventually blows the whistle and is soon visited by a most horrible entity.

"...but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed. He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash toward the window, where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped his screen. This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne—he didn’t know why—to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted towards it, and bent over and felt the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time what manner of thing it was. But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins’s face. He could not—though he knew how perilous a sound was—he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon the instant, an the next moment he was half-way through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bed-clothes.

Early on in “The Face in the Frost” Prospero, the protagonist of this tale, enters his cellar to fetch a pitcher of ale. While filling the pitcher, his eyes spot a cloak hanging on the wall, and as it begins to move, Prospero is filled with dread:

He looked absently around the cellar as he waited for the pitcher to fill, and suddenly his eye was caught by the fluttering of an old cloak hanging on a wooden peg. And in that instant Prospero got the odd notion that the cloak was not his, and might not be a cloak at all. He stared intently at it as the fluttering of the garment became more agitated. And then it turned to meet him. With empty flapping arms it floated across the cellar floor, swaying in a sickening nightmare rhythm. Prospero clenched his fist and felt his pulse beating in his palms; he fought the rising fear as the cloak flapped nearer, for with all his heart he did not want it close to him. As it closed the gap between them, all the spells against apparitions ran through his mind, but he had the queasy felling that none of them would work. The thing was about six feet from him, its cold musty-cellar breath faintly brushing his face, when it simply stopped. The flapping arms dropped, and the gray cloak, or whatever it was, slumped into a ragged heap on the stone floor. (FF 7)

"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" influence:

Compare the three figures in the stained glass windows of the church with the figures in SSS on page 4.

Also the scroll in Job's hand from "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" was inscribed with the words: “Auro est locus in quo absconditur (for conflatur).” Whereas in MM on page 20 we find the clue “Auro est locus in quo conflatur.” As Emerson informs us “The Latin phrase is from the Book of Job in the bible. It means: There is a place for gold where it is gathered together.” (MM 20-21)

"The Haunted Dolls' House" influence:

James' story involves an antique dollhouse in which a man purchases and later watches in horror as a terrible story unfolds inside the miniature dwelling.

In SSS Johnny Dixon witnesses a terrible scene inside the dollhouse room that is part of the Childermass Clock.

Although I can't find specifics here, I would think John's SSS was at least partially inspired by James' short story.

And of course there is Strickland'S The Tower at the End of the World, which continues the tradition.

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¹ H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927