Product Description

'Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man' Rudyard Kipling, celebrated author of The Jungle Book, the Just So Stories and other entertaining fictions, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark imaginings. This collection presents the best of these strange tales in which ghosts, monsters and inexplicable happenings abound. From the exotic and magical locale of India, to the leafy suburbs of England and then to the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War, Kipling provides us with a chilling array of experiences and images which will linger long in the memory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120533 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Hair-raising tales from a master story-teller
There are 20 very readable and enjoyable short stories in this excellent collection. It starts with a werewolf tale, next comes an account of wicked murder poorly concealed and shockingly uncovered, then a wronged woman haunts her heartless lover, then an arrogant man falls into a pit of living death. There are ghost stories both straight-forward and convoluted, a sea-monster tale, a story of young people whose minds are terribly exposed to the frightening experiences of their parents by a type of drug and several tales that are simply strange.

It surprised me slightly, to find that Rudyard Kipling went in for ghost and horror stories, so I ordered the book out of curiosity as much as my devotion (it may be an actual addiction) to the ghost story genre. I'm delighted to report that I rate this collection up there with the best in class. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys those old fashioned tales of the supernatural that are almost completely free of gore.

Complex and frightening
Jungle book this ain't, but a collection of complex, terrifying and often very moving short stories by the first British (and still the youngest) recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The stories can be broken down into three categories if you like: Tales of the supernatural, disturbing psycho-dramas and Edwardian entertainments. Of the first, the best are set amongst forgotten young men at the fringes of empire - lost in an alien continent and exposed to conditions and superstitions they cannot or will not try to understand. These tales involve lycanthropy, lost villages of the damned, ghost legions of murdered horsemen, hideous blind, crying things in the cellar and unquiet corpses in the roof. Some of these are truly scary, but it is Kipling's ability to generate atmosphere and convey psychological upheaval that is striking. Some of the stories set in Europe are deeply moving. Kipling's life was blighted with tragedy - his daughter died at a young age and his son was killed in the Great War. "They", in which the narrator accidentally uncovers a country house populated by the ghosts of dead children,"Mary Postgate", which is basically a premonition of what it would be like to lose a child in war, and " A Madonna of the Trenches", written a few years after his son's death, are almost unbearably poignant.

Get beyond the "poet of Empire" tag often lazily associated with Kipling and you can understand why he was lauded in his day as the successor to Dickens. Comparisons with Hardy and James may have been more appropriate.