IT’S the time of year when countless generations have felt the impulse to draw closer to the fire to listen to an eerie story.

These days, we might not often get the chance to do so, which made this telling of two MR James stories even more of a pleasure.

The format is simplicity itself. Robert Lloyd Parry, looking rather like James himself, walks onto the tiny stage of Lighthouse’s Sherling Studio, settles himself in an armchair, pours a drink from a decanter and begins his tale.

The first half of the evening is devoted to probably MR James’s most famous story, Casting the Runes – known by many as the basis for the great horror 1957 movie Night of the Demon.

The premise is that the protagonist has offended an alchemist and has been handed by him some enchanted pieces of paper, which will bring him to a sinister end unless he can find a way of handing them back.

After an interval, there is the less well known The Residence at Whitminster – perhaps quite not as great a story, but here given the compelling delivery that marked the whole evening.

You might imagine that the audience’s attention might wander at times and that the old-fashioned conceit of an evening spent with a single narrator might wear thin. Not a bit of it, because Parry – who has been doing this for more than a decade – was never less than riveting.

With barely any light except that coming from three candles, he drew the audience in with a performance of great range and subtlety. His style was sometimes relaxed, sometimes slyly comic, often quiet and, occasionally, terrifyingly intense.

There was barely a fidget or the creak of a seat as the audience stayed with him, enthralled, until the very end.