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Rudyard Kipling's Ghost Stories
Aug. 17th, 2004 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilenceRudyard Kipling is famous for his stories of colonial India, in which he often dispensed what seemed at the time to be sound common sense but now looks a bit like outdated imperialism. However, during a recent reading of his ghost story They I was struck by his great sensitivity and compassion, and the deft way in which he causes the faintest of tingles to creep up the reader’s spine…So I thought I’d provide the community with a few snippets of information about the author and his darker side (which was never all that well buried in the first place!)
( A little review )
Anyway on to the links. The HorrorMasters Kipling page has 13 of his ghost stories, the best-known being The Recrudescence Of Imray, The Mark Of The Beast, They and At The End Of The Passage. For those of you who can’t be doing with PDFs there is a nicely presented online copy of At The End Of The Passage here. I especially love the grisly Himalayan poem at the head of the story! A lot more fun than the hideously motivational If anyway.
Project Gutenberg also offer an anthology, The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories (mmm, The Phantom Rickshaw. Didn’t anyone dare tell Kipling that the title was a bit of a giveaway?)
If you are interested in Kipling’s other writing or just want to find out more about him as a person, The Kipling Society's elegant website provides a comprehensive list of all Kipling’s stories, some of which have had notes written for them.
And finally good old Litgothic have a bundle of other links and trivia for us, and point out that They, published in 1904, may well be the first ghost story in which an automobile plays a significant role (Kipling himself was an early adopter of the car.) The vehicle itself is not supernatural however - in fact the narrator’s regular bouts of car trouble provide some mundane comic relief (which actually heightens the ethereal atmosphere of the house and it’s inhabitants by contrast, in my opinion.) I reckon the first ghost story to involve a car that is itself ghostly is probably The Violet Car by Edith Nesbit (1910.) But now I’m just wittering…
( A little review )
Anyway on to the links. The HorrorMasters Kipling page has 13 of his ghost stories, the best-known being The Recrudescence Of Imray, The Mark Of The Beast, They and At The End Of The Passage. For those of you who can’t be doing with PDFs there is a nicely presented online copy of At The End Of The Passage here. I especially love the grisly Himalayan poem at the head of the story! A lot more fun than the hideously motivational If anyway.
Project Gutenberg also offer an anthology, The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories (mmm, The Phantom Rickshaw. Didn’t anyone dare tell Kipling that the title was a bit of a giveaway?)
If you are interested in Kipling’s other writing or just want to find out more about him as a person, The Kipling Society's elegant website provides a comprehensive list of all Kipling’s stories, some of which have had notes written for them.
And finally good old Litgothic have a bundle of other links and trivia for us, and point out that They, published in 1904, may well be the first ghost story in which an automobile plays a significant role (Kipling himself was an early adopter of the car.) The vehicle itself is not supernatural however - in fact the narrator’s regular bouts of car trouble provide some mundane comic relief (which actually heightens the ethereal atmosphere of the house and it’s inhabitants by contrast, in my opinion.) I reckon the first ghost story to involve a car that is itself ghostly is probably The Violet Car by Edith Nesbit (1910.) But now I’m just wittering…
