Rudyard Kipling's Ghost Stories
Aug. 17th, 2004 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesRudyard 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colonial India, in which he often dispensed what seemed at the time to be sound common sense but now looks a bit like outdated imperialism.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!)
They is my personal favourite among Kipling’s stories. A well-off educated gentleman (of the sort you’d expect to find in an E.F. Benson story) stumbles on a secluded country house nestling in a wood, while motoring for pleasure round the sunlit southern coast of England. The denizens of the house – a blind woman with a voice of ineffable sweetness, her devoted servants and some unusually shy children – cast a lingering spell on the narrator, who soon returns to the house to further his acquaintance with the people who have touched him so deeply…This heartbreaking but finally uplifting story is all subtlety, eerie rather than horrifying, a chill breeze rather than a hurricane, and stayed in my mind long after I had finished reading. The descriptions of the landscape (I think the story is set on the Sussex Downs), the shady woods, the garden ringing with childrens’ light voices and the lonely old house could really not be bettered, and the characters have a psychological depth beyond anything Benson ever managed. The process by which the blind woman and the narrator are drawn together is sketched in such a skillful way that you hardly notice it happening. Great proof of the adage that you need to be a truly great writer to turn out a decent ghost story!
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…
They is my personal favourite among Kipling’s stories. A well-off educated gentleman (of the sort you’d expect to find in an E.F. Benson story) stumbles on a secluded country house nestling in a wood, while motoring for pleasure round the sunlit southern coast of England. The denizens of the house – a blind woman with a voice of ineffable sweetness, her devoted servants and some unusually shy children – cast a lingering spell on the narrator, who soon returns to the house to further his acquaintance with the people who have touched him so deeply…This heartbreaking but finally uplifting story is all subtlety, eerie rather than horrifying, a chill breeze rather than a hurricane, and stayed in my mind long after I had finished reading. The descriptions of the landscape (I think the story is set on the Sussex Downs), the shady woods, the garden ringing with childrens’ light voices and the lonely old house could really not be bettered, and the characters have a psychological depth beyond anything Benson ever managed. The process by which the blind woman and the narrator are drawn together is sketched in such a skillful way that you hardly notice it happening. Great proof of the adage that you need to be a truly great writer to turn out a decent ghost story!
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…
