Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror & Fantasy by Rudyard Kipling

by Rudyard Kipling, Neil Gaiman (Introduction), Stephen Jones (Editor)

"Rudyard Kipling is one of the finest writers of fantasy in the last one hundred years."-Ray Bradbury

"Kipling has seen a perfect Odyssey of strange experiences."-Andrew Lang

This volume collects many of the Nobel Prize-winning writer's fantastical pieces ranging from traditional ghost stories to works of psychological horror.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, India, but was raised in England until he returned to India in 1881 as a journalist. In 1907, Kipling became the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1902), and Just So Stories (1902), which are renowned throughout the world.

Includes:
The vampire
The dream of Duncan Parrenness
The city of dreadful night
An Indian ghost story in England
The phantom 'rickshaw
The strange ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The unlimited draw of Tick Boileau
In the house of Suddhoo
The Bisara of Pooree
Haunted subalterns
By word of mouth
The recurring smash
The dreitarbund
Bubbling well road
The sending of Dana Da
My own true ghost story
Sleipner, late Thurinda
The man who would be king
The solid muldoon
Baboo Mookerji's undertaking
The joker
The wandering Jew
The courting of Dinah Shadd
The mark of the beast
At the end of the passage
The recrudescence of Imray
The finances of the gods
The finest story in the world
Children of the zodiac
The lost legion
A matter of fact
The bridge-builders
The brushwood boy
The tomb of his ancestors
Wireless
"They"
With the night mail : a story of 2000 AD
The house surgeon
The knife and the naked chalk
In the same boat
As easy as A.B.C.: a tale of 2150 AD
Swept and garnished
Mary Postgate
The village that voted the earth was flat
A madonna of the trenches
The wish house
The gardener
The eye of Allah
On the gate: a tale of '16
The appeal

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Science Fiction, Supernatural

783 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist.

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Man's Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 41, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. On the night of 12 January 1936, Kipling suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died less than a week later on 18 January 1936 at the age of 70 of a perforated duodenal ulcer. Kipling's death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."

Reviews

[J.G. Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He writes to pique, slowly twisting out his stories and drawing the reader along unexpected and unrecognized roads. Each tale might set the mind on a new and unusual tack, and hence, more than anything, Kipling is an author for authors: an author whose imagination is contagious.

His stories always center around the foreign mystery of his native-born India, but more than that, of the intersection of dry, Anglican Protestantism and vibrant, deadly, magical Hindu tradition. The Greeks long ago borrowed from the Indian mystics the ideas of the soul, of atomism, and asceticism, and since then, the West has adopted holy meditation, the scourge of the flesh, and the One God who is Many.

Kipling's cultural crossroads is not a new conflation, but a reintroduction of an old acquaintanceship. Many of his earlier stories present a kind of deniable magic: a magic which is only magical because it is unfamiliar, and which later finds a perfectly reasonable explanation. It is not hard to imagine such overgrown superstitions on the parts of the British, whose magical roots have been long straitlaced and sublimated, excepting ghost stories at Christmas.

In 'My Own True Ghost Story', we find a Britain who is obsessed with finding magic in India, and who comes to find it only because he looks for it everywhere. Kipling's works are full of such reversals of expectation, where it is not the 'alien magic of India' at fault, but the alien India which a foreigner wishes were true.

In his introduction, Neil Gaiman mentions the stigma of Colonialism that follows Kipling to this day. Kipling was representing the point of view of a ruling class descended from a foreign culture, but he is hardly dismissive of Indian culture or its traditions. Indeed, he does not try to make anything absurd out of Indian culture, nor does he try to represent it from the inside.

Though many may be content to declare him a racist and a colonialist because he was of the race of conquerors, that stance forgets that every nation has been conquered and sublimated by a series of various cultures, and that this should not invalidate the conquering culture any more than it invalidates the conquered culture. Even North America's native people wiped out a previous aboriginal population in staking their claim.

Gaiman is also one of the authors who shows a clear line of inspiration back to Kipling. The concept of his novel 'American Gods' is completely laid out in Kipling's 'The Bridge-Builders'. Likewise, one can find the roots of Gaiman and Pratchett's 'Good Omens' in Kipling's 'The Appeal', which also forms a background for C.S. Lewis' 'Screwtape Letters'. All three show the afterlife in terms of a purely British bureaucracy: polite and convoluted. Kipling also provides a scaffold for Gaiman's favorite: 'awkward fellow in an incomprehensible underbelly of horrifying magic'.

Yet these are not the only threads to be traced through Kipling. 'A Matter of Fact' is a proto-lovecraftian horror tale, if there ever was one, from the carefully-paced, skewed tone to the confessional style to the incomprehensible sea creatures and the alienating realization that the truth often has no place in the world of man.

The collection also includes a pair of science fiction tales, which are not Kipling's best work. The first, especially, is difficult to follow. His retro-future is barely comprehensible today, and he has made the most common mistake of the unskilled sci fi author: he explains too much. He spends much more time on describing his unusual, convoluted technologies than on imagining the sort of world they would produce.

The second, 'As Easy as ABC: A Tale of 2150 AD ', spends more time on plot, politics, and character, and if one makes it through the overwrought sections, one can see a prototype of 1984. The political tack of the story tries to tackle fascism versus democracy decades before it became a reality. While he does not have Verne's eye for the social impact of technology, he did succeed in making a remarkably forward-looking tale.

He also dabbles in metaphysical and psychic connections, trying to divine the nature of consciousness. In 'The Finest Story in the World', he presents a case of previous lives as the lively backdrop for a true Author's Story. The narrator obsesses with writing, talent, inspiration, and the eternally looming specter of Lost Perfection in a way which threatens to pull out the heart of any aspiring writer by its strings.

'The Brushwood Boy' deals with another obsession of the writer: the despair that there will never really be an audience who can comprehend you. Eventually, the tale collapses neatly into a paranormal love story, but its implications stretch far beyond its conclusion. 'Wireless' takes a technological tack in the question of whether there might be a universal source of human inspiration.

He also writes many more standard English Ghost stories, usually regarding mental breakdown and obsession, as in the 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' or 'Sleipner, Late Thurinda'. Perhaps the most powerful of these is the seemingly innocuous 'They', which subtly and slowly builds a mood of thick unease without resorting to any tricks or shocks.

There are also the tales of a world which suddenly turns, growing stranger that the protagonist could have imagined, but without resorting to magic or the uncanny. Such stories as 'The City of Dreadful Night', 'Bubbling Well Road', 'The Strange Ride of Morrowby Jukes', and 'The Tomb of his Ancestors' ask us to accept a world which seems eminently possible, if unlikely. It is these stories that most stretch our horizons by asking us to imagine something which requires not a leap of faith, but merely a coincidence of remarkable circumstances or an unusual world view.

Kipling also has chance to show the humorists' pen in the Fish Story 'The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau' and in the uproarious farce "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat', which rises in ever steeper climaxes of unimagined consequences until it begins to shake the high seat (and low comedy) of Wodehouse himself.

There are many other tales besides, from Fairy Stories to original Mythology (which Kipling fully realized in his lovely 'Just so Stories'), adventures, and even a mystery. Kipling's great wealth of production and imagination is daunting, but we may at least take comfort in the fact that his soaring wit is not the kind that overawes and dumbs us, but the sort which sets our mouths to laugh and call, and our minds to dance and twitter, or to fall suddenly into unknown and unrecognized depths in just the place we thought we knew the best.

He may lack the poetic turn of Conrad, the drive of Verne, or the harrowing of James, but neither could they lay claim to the far-ranging vivacity of that ingenuity that is, and remains, Kipling's.

My Suggested Fantasy Books

[Warren Fournier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in his Sandman days, when Neil Gaiman listed Kipling as one of his favorite writers, he evidently got a bit of grief for it. Gaiman ruminated for a long time about an appropriate response to those he felt had never read Kipling and knew nothing about the man other than what they were told to believe. He never actually wrote or sent a reply until years later when he was asked to write an introduction to this extensive collection of Kipling's fantasy works, and here he delivers a heartfelt defense of an author that Gaiman genuinely believes wrote some of the finest works in the English language.

Now I had never read Kipling myself until now. The closest I ever came was listening to a children's adaptation of "Riki Tiki Tavi" on my old record player when I was seven, and "The Jungle Book" was one of my favorite Disney cartoons. But as an adult, I had no interest in the writing of someone who I assumed romanticized colonialism and a was a poet of imperialists.

But as a testament to how horror, science fiction, and fantasy can bring us together, I could not resist wondering what Kipling brought to the genres. So when I found out that this book contained almost 1000 pages of genre material, including the seminal Radium-Age science fiction novel "With the Night Mail," I decided to give the guy a try. I'll just touch on some of the highlights.

Perhaps of the most famous of these stories is "The Phantom Rickshaw," about a man who is perhaps unduly cruel to a woman who can't seem to get the message that he is not into her. When she dies, it seems she continues to not take the hint, and haunts the man in her phantom rickshaw till the end of his days. It's an interesting story about guilt, the binds of social conventions, and how mental illness was looked upon in Victorian times.

I enjoyed the short story "An Indian Ghost in England." First of all, it is one of the creepiest and most delightfully atmospheric of Kipling's writings, and he does this on purpose, as ultimately this is about how rumors and assumptions literally shape our reality.

Several of the stories with a supernatural appeal actually were of the Scooby Doo variety, with a tidy explanation provided at the end, while other times the stories were simple fairy tales, likely gathered from oral sources the author encountered in India. I was surprised that most of his stories were told with a humorous or satirical flare, so that despite the dark subject matter, his writing evoked more chuckles than goosebumps.

Not every story is about ghosts, nor are they funny. "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" is a wonderful early example of a suspenseful psychological thriller, about a man who accidentally falls into a prison designed like an antlion pit, where people who recover from near-death experiences are for some reason left to live out the rest of their days.

Many of the stories, though often containing an abundance of archaic Victorian slang, were delightfully written and easy to comprehend. But sometimes there was a conclusion or punchline that made no sense, such as in "The Recurring Smash," and at times I didn't understand what the hell was going on at all. I did some research on these stories to try to understand them better, and it turns out nobody really seems to know what Kipling was getting at in such cases.

Speaking of being unable to understand, Kipling seems to have been writing exclusively for people who had knowledge of life in 19th Century British-occupied India. He uses words and phrases to describe people and places that are certainly not in use today, nor would they have been common knowledge to anyone in the homeland at the time. He rarely ever defines any of these terms, and it's not like people had access to the internet back then. Therefore, I suspect that even though Kipling used these references to depict very specific characteristics not easily translated into standard English, much of this nuanced writing was missed by the general readership who had never resided in colonial India, and it merely serves as a nuisance today.

Perhaps where his writing style can be most annoying to modern readers is in the most famous of these stories, "The Man Who Would Be King." I did not connect with that one at all. See my separate review of that novella for more thoughts.

So obviously I still take issue with some aspects of Kipling's writing, and might even suggest that you'd not be missing anything if you skipped some of these entries. But there are quite a few gems that you may want to make sure are on your reading list. You science fiction aficionados will definitely be interested in the aforementioned novella "With the Night Mail" and its sequel "Easy as A.B.C." I also have separate reviews for those books on Goodreads.

On a final note, I strongly recommend the short story "The Gardener," an extremely poignant and touching tale that was very personal to Kipling, who based this story on the loss of his own son in World War I.

In conclusion, I think Gaiman was right to point out that you don't have to be aligned to the politics of an artist or to be sympathetic with everything they stood for as a person. You can still get something important from their work, and maybe with a little more knowledge and facts under your belt, you might be surprised to find that you weren't necessarily correct in your assumptions in the first place. When I was a kid, I was scared to death to ever listen to the music of The Doors or Led Zeppelin, because my own middle school and high school teachers said they were satanic. Seriously. But we truly will never grow unless we see for ourselves what all the hubbub is about. I certainly have associates that I even consider friends who have divergent worldviews, because they grew up in a different era, with different upbringing, and with different experiences. Sometimes they help me understand where they are coming from, or vice versa, and that gives us common ground and shared beliefs. Sometimes I learn enough from them to help me decide that, indeed, my way of thinking is truly what makes more sense to me, and we just agree to disagree. Of course, I'm not saying that we should be open to let negative influences or evil into our hearts. But I do find that evil stems from being unwilling to understand the Other, and thus going through life in fear. Fear breeds resentment and contempt, shields us from the truth, and prevents us from figuring out and living out our true personal values.

Kipling truly was a great writer and had his pulse on the human condition despite his background. Though I can't say he is the best writer in the English language, nor did all of his works resonate with me, I'm glad I explored this book, and if you give it a try, I think you will be too.

[Nicki Markus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it hard to get into this book. To be fair, I've found Kipling a bit heavy going in the past - there's just something about his writing style that puts me off - but when I saw this book of his short stories, I felt it was time to give him a second chance.

Certainly a few of the stories caught my interest and held it, but for the most part I found them too verbose to ever be really chilling. The ideas were there, including a delightful mix of commentary on and borrowing from Indian culture, but Kipling's prose is just so wordy and it's a slog to get through it. I read writers like Tolstoy and Joyce and they, too, can be wordy, but with them it is a pleasure; with Kipling I find it a chore.

That said, a few did entertain me and certainly fans of Kipling would enjoy this extensive anthology of his shorter works, so I give it three stars over all: not quite my cup of tea, but a lovely collection for a fan.

I received this book as a free e-book ARC via NetGalley.

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories by one of the masters of the form.

I keep saying, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is Kipling." I don't mean he literally only had one eye, but that, as a supporter of Britsh colonialism, he was remarkably clear-eyed, up to a point. His adult stories are about not abusing power (or see what it'll get you), but never about returning power to those whom it belonged.

His stories are masterpieces of order and structure. If you want a clear tale with a perfectly set-up plot twist, Kipling's your author. He also seems to be a solid contender for the originator of several different types of stories: I spotted progenitors to The Name of the Rose, Good Omens, Lovecraft, and even splatterpunk ("Mary Postgate"). Lots of excellent ghost stories, too.

Highly recommended for writers studying craft, and those who like traditional stories.

[Željko Obrenović · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nil Gejmen je pisao predgovor, Stiv Džons pogovor, a između je 800 strana fenomenalnih priča. Između ostalog, tu je Čovek koji je hteo da bude kralj, po kojoj je snimljen istoimeni film Džona Hjustona, sa Šonom Konerijem u glavnoj ulozi. Ne očekujte Knjigu o džungli, ovde će vam se predstaviti jedan potpuno drugačiji Kipling. Čak i one priče, nastale u kanonu viktorijanskog slova, osvežene su makar poentom. Prava poslastica za svakog ljubitelja kratke forme i svakako knjiga koju vredi imati i često jos se vraćati.

[M Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me a while to read for several reasons. For one thing, at the time I started it, I was also working through the massive "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years." I almost always have 2 or three books going at once so I can switch off depending on my mood and concentration level. Also, my Sabbatical ended while I was working on this volume, which meant I had far less time to read. Most importantly though, and what kept me from giving this collection 5 stars, is that it starts quite slowly. The collection is arranged in order of publication date. With the early stories being written as early in Kipling's career as 1884-5, what we have is far from the work of the accomplished author he was to become. They're not juvenalia and each story on its own stands up just fine but taken together the first 10-15 stories tend to be a bit "much of a muchness."

By the time the reader reaches the classic "The Man Who Would Be King," however, the situation changes. Now we have a mature Kipling, confident in his craft. The plots and characters are far more varied as is the diction. From that point forward, the book is a delight. A hitherto undiscovered treasure for me was "The Brushwood Boy" and I was pleased to run into my old friends Puck, Dan and Una in "The Knife and the Naked Chalk," a chapter from "Rewards and Fairies." Only Kipling's two forays into science fiction marred my pleasure. I found both "With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD" and "As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD" to be unreadable.

I've been a fan of Kipling's verse and stories since I was a child. The reservations expressed above notwithstanding, this is a solid addition to my library. I recommend it but remember to take it slowly through the first quarter or so of the book to allow the slighter stories to have room to please your palette before you devour the heartier fare to come.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman, who wrote the introduction, but I've never read Kipling.
Update - Good introduction to Kipling.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I had read most of these already, but I always enjoy Kipling's stories.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading this book rather slowly. I read a couple of short stories now and then in between other novels. Some of the stories are quite good. "Vampire" is a poem that I have in another collection. No this is not about the supernatural vampire but rather a poem about a man's unrequited love for a woman who did not seem to notice his devotion to her. "Even as you and I" as the line states several times. I feel we may all relate this poem as most of us have been on one side or the other (or more likely both sides) of a devotion and love which was not returned.

A FOOL there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair—
(Even as you and I!)

"The Phantom Rickshaw" is a classic ghost story and this book also contains the classic novella, "The Man Who Would Be King" about two British Adventures who travel to Eastern Afghanistan in the mountains to the Kafir (pagans) who lived there. They brought with them 20 rifles to impress the people and subjugate their neighbors. They worshipped them as gods and the incarnation of Alexander. The ending is tragic and fits this collection very well. Some of the stories stay with you while others are enjoyable but forgettable. I've actually skipped around a bit so I have read more of the book than 117 pages but highly recommend it whether you've never read Kipling or you are already familiar with his works.
I'm still reading....

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sorry to admit that I had never read anything of Rudyard Kipling before this book, except for the occasional poem. He's an amazing writer, I ought to read more.

This is not one of his children's books. The stories are decidedly creepy, but several of them have that British dry humor to go along with it. The introduction by Neil Gaiman (a current, well-regarded fantasy and horror author) mentions that Rudyard Kipling has fallen out of favor because of some of his political views. I found the "British Empire" viewpoint to be fascinating for the historical context of the stories. I think people ought to study mindsets that are no longer politically correct so that they can understand where people were in the past and see how far we've come.

These stories span Kipling's career and lifetime. The stories give insights to the Victorian English in India all the way through post World War I.

A couple of the stories could correctly be called science fiction, but some of their references, I wasn't able to follow because I am so unfamiliar with Victorian era technology and vernacular. The stories would be very interesting to fans of "Steam Punk" style science fiction.

[Finergrind]

I wish I had read this prior to working in India. India continues to be a mystery to me... Is it a chrome edged, high tech Goliath, or a gilded mandala reflecting the past? Each time I visit India I'm left wanting to know more about. I've read most of Kipling's more popular works, but I'm surprised by his chilling tales of India. I doubt there is a more eerie setting than the countryside of India, and the caste system there provides an opportunity for sufficient horror to be visited on the good, and the bad...

I remember "The Phantom Rickshaw", but I'm saving that story for last. I was drawn into "The City Of Dreadful Night" and think it demonstrates a realistic representation of the British Raj and the treatment of India's peoples. So far, this is an excellent book to read; a great way to unwind before sleep...

[Kas Roth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't expecting this to be something that was comfortable to read, however, it just wasn't my cup of tea. The arrogant main characters are a complete turnoff and they aren't getting payback really. It's like I'm supposed to feel sorry for them, but they're all the same interchangeable Englishman who uses violence and childish entitlement to get his way.

It is what it is, considering the time-period. Not a difficult read, but not really horror or fantasy as much as a dairy style retelling.

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have loved Kipling since I was a little girl, but I'd never really read much of his darker writing. I was happy to find that I enjoyed it just as much as his lighter works.

A nice little collection- maybe not for everyone since Kipling's writing style is very much a product of when he was writing.

[Will]

Just got this as a holiday gift and it looks magnificent. It looks like 785 pages of inspiration to finish one of the seven stories I have running right now. Thanks, Kate!

UPDATE: Kipling's got this remarkably casual voice, dressed in Victorian style. I'd forgotten. It's lovely.

[Roseann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories are great, others I just don't get...guess it's the period humor or references that make things a little difficult to comprehend!

[Jon Ring · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this was a good book. Some of the stories have not stood the test of time very well, however. The science fiction in the book was filled with much fanciful wording and was almost unreadable at times. Kipling can be a hard read anyway, he can say alot by saying nothing, and you have to really follow closely to every word to understand what he's talking about. That being said, some of the ideas are truly amazing, and his attention to detail is exact, truly painting brilliant snapshots of Victorian times. What I hadn't expected was his sense of humor. At one point when I was reading in bed I scared my wife when I burst into laughter after reading a particular passage. For a joke to hold up for over a hundred years is pretty impressive!

[Brenton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd never read any Kipling before this, not being familiar with any of his works other than The Jungle Book (and I don't think I've even read that...embarrassingly, I've only experienced it by way of the old Disney adaptation). I picked it up first and foremost because I'm on the hunt for classic horror and science fiction, and also because I was curious what Neil Gaiman had to say about Kipling in his introduction.

I did not know what I was in for. I know when I am reading a solid science fiction tale. I know when I am reading a well-crafted ghost story. I also know when what I am reading transcends whatever basic genre it happens to fall into and enters the realm of timeless Literature. And this describes the work of Kipling. This collection of tales will require multiple readings on my part before I ever feel like I have even a tenuous grasp on Kipling's craft. As noted in Gaiman's introduction, the characters herein feel so much more real than other authors' characters, with lives that happened before the story and that go on after the story. There is, within these pages, such a deep and pervading sense of history, of the collective human organism burbling to and fro, a river running through time, that you easily lose the sense that you are reading someone's attempt at fiction and instead feel that you are in fact reading true snapshots taken out of this planet's half-known and half-understood past. This is Beautiful Literature.

The collection here covers a wide swath of ground, from traditional supernatural ghost stories to globe-trotting treks of adventure to visceral macabre tales of human struggle. There are even a small handful of far-flung speculative pieces with feet solidly planted in science fiction. The highlight, of course, is the famous "The Man Who Would Be King", held aloft by more than a few scholars as one of if not the finest short story ever written in the English language (and its reading should be quickly followed by a viewing of the excellent 1975 film with Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Christopher Plummer). My personal favorite may have been "The City of Dreadful Night", which is nothing more than a description of an Indian city's feverish attempt to sleep beneath the heel of summer's monstrous heat, yet is one of the most evocative short stories I've ever read.

The one aspect of these writings that I had trouble with, especially earlier in the book, was their deep entrenchment in colonial Indian culture, geography, and nomenclature. In fact, the only thing that would make this book even better would be a fully annotated edition. However, Wikipedia, a dictionary, and Kipling's rich talent for tale-telling will keep you afloat.

[Tasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I love Kipling's poetry, and as obsessed as I was as a younger reader with his Just So Stories and the two Jungle Books collections, it still took me many months to get through this collection, because so many of them are slow, laborious going. There are a few real chillers in this collection, and a few stories that really capture something intimate and unique about relationships or expectations or feelings of duty or love for a very specific job. But so many of them are overly wordy — one relatively simple story about a British officer deemed the reincarnation of a local power in India starts off with a seemingly infinite list of his achievements, and a highly detailed run-through of his history that feels like a Dickensian exercise in being paid by the word.

It certainly isn't Kipling's fault that so many of these stories come from such a particular mindset, a colonial and paternalistic and openly racist one, such that he casually drops comments about how hilarious it would be if brown men produced ghosts when they died, because it's not like anyone expects them to have souls. But that doesn't make it any less wearisome to read the 20th story in a row about the British putting down some local uprising by killing all the Indians in sight, or about the casual, amused contempt the British characters have for the country they're keeping down. It's a running theme because it's such a prevalent background attitude, just an understanding of the way the world works, but it's hard to fully enjoy fantasy stories with such a hateful bent baked inevitably into their mindset.

There are a handful of real gems here, but far fewer than I'd hoped for, compared to other Kipling collections I've read. I feel like maybe the real classics have all been pulled out and put into other, briefer compilations, and what we have here is a much more comprehensive and completist collection, including a lot of overly long and overly dreary stories that don't either feel colorful enough to be standout fantasies, or unsettling enough to be standout horror.

[Tinquerbelle]

1) The Vampire
2) The Dream of Duncan Parrenness
3) The City of Dreadful Night
4) An Indian Ghost in England
5) The Phantom 'Rickshaw
6) The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
7) The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau
8) In the House of Suddhoo
9) The Bisara of Pooree
10) Haunted Subalterns
11) By Word of Mouth
12) The Recurring Smash
13) The Dreitarbund
14) Bubbling Well Road
15) The Sending of Dana Da
16) My Own True Ghost Story
17) Sleipner, Late Thurinda
18) The Man Who Would Be King
19) The Solid Muldoon
20) Baboo Mookerji's Undertaking
21) The Joker
22) The Wandering Jew
23) The Courting of Dinah Shadd
24) The Mark of the Beast
25) At the End of the Passage
26) The Recrudescence of Imray
27) The Finances of the Gods
28) The Finest Story in the World
29) Children of the Zodiac
30) The Lost Legion
31) A Matter of Fact
32) The Bridge-Builders
33) The Brushwood Boy
34) The Tomb of His Ancestors
35) Wireless
36) 'They'
37) With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD
38) The House Surgeon
39) The Knife and the Naked Chalk
40) In the Same Boat
41) As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD
42) Swept and Garnished
43) Mary Postgate
44) The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat
45) A Madonna of the Trenches
46) The Wish House
47) The Gardener
48) The Eye of Allah
49) On the Gate: A Tale of '16
50) The Appeal

[Jonathan Natusch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before picking this collection up, I hadn't been aware of anything that Rudyard Kipling wrote beyond Just So Stories and The Jungle Books. It's a mixed bag, though many of the pieces have a very similar feel.
When I first started reading this collection, I whipped through the first half with a hiss and a roar. The stories were concise, and mostly entertaining. Then, a change began to occur. The stories got longer, more padded, with the payoffs less rewarding. There were attempts at science fiction, which really haven't aged well. I began to skim through entire stories, just hoping to finally get to the end of the volume.
Four stars for the first half, two stars for the second half...

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I absolutely abhorred this collection of stories which is evidenced by the 2 years it took me to finish the book. I had never read anything by Kipling before but as a child loved the Rikki Tikki Tavi cartoon so I thought I'd love these stories too. I was so wrong on that account. HAlf of the time I had no idea what was going on because it seemed like key details were left out of the stories, and the times I did understand I was bored out of my mind. If I could put down a book without finishing, this definitely would have been on my abandoned list.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

What passed for horror in Kippling's day will put the modern fan of the genre to sleep. I am not a fan myself, but I am a fan of Kippling. Don't read this book for the thrill of a good scare ( if you're into that), but instead read it for its total lack of any political correctness, the beautiful discriptions of the exotic people and places of late 19th century India and for Kippling's wonderful ear for dialect. If you're new to Kippling don't start with this. I love Kipplng's style, but found most of these stories boring, so just two stars.

[Jeremiah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I struggled through this book and finally put it down 86% of the way through. Rudyard Kipling is a talented writer his stories are well constructed. The problem I had with this book is that with a handful of exceptions his stories are dull and uninteresting. I do not have a problem with classical literature and love a great deal of stories from the 19th century and early 20th but I have used up any desire to ever read another piece by Mr. Kipling.

[Frankie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neil Gaiman's introduction was eye-opening for me, and this is the first time I've read Kipling while keeping the historical context in mind. I'm liking it so far, and just finished reading "The Man Who Would Be King"...it looks like the movie with Sean Connery was pretty true to the story (although it's been a LONG time since I've seen the movie).

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only read 4 of the short stories, can't imagine reading the whole book...just not into horror...

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still slowly working my way through these stories.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were good, but others sort of dropped off or nothing really seemed to happen. I also just couldn't read more colonial bigotry. I guess I'm up to 3 books I never finished.

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended by Neil Gaiman on The View from the Cheap Seats. Expected more punch from this collection, but my verdict is: average.

[Sharon M Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

not too bad!

[Molly Trammell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it took me a month but I finished this 785 page behemoth and, while I almost didn't (quite a few times), I'm glad that I ultimately stuck with it. Kipling was a great writer and is an important part of the Western canon, but he has begun to be overlooked and disparaged due to his (badly aging) Victorian views. This is causing an important oeuvre to be driven into obscurity. Readers must understand that Kipling was a man of his era. While they should not be lauded or excused, the more questionable and biased views embedded in his writing can be understood in context as a byproduct of the misguided patriarchal social constructs under which he lived. Again, this does not excuse him but it does explain him. And perhaps by understanding Kipling and the time period in which he was writing, we can read his literature with a grain (or a bucket) of salt in the areas where that is necessary and with appreciation in the areas where his literary mastery shines.

What I'm really trying to say here is don't write off Kipling before you've read him and don't let distaste keep you from enjoying some of the remarkable writing this author left us. Disagree, question, discuss - but first you must read.

And don't miss "The Appeal" at the end of the book. Kipling had a thing or two to say about this as well...

"The Appeal"

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little span
The dead are borne in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

...

Now, onto the meat of the thing.
If you don't particularly feel like digging through this whole book, some of my favorite stories were (possible spoilers in the little blurbs if you'd rather go into the story without any info.):

"The Vampire" - a poem.
"The Phantom Rickshaw" - a tale of a man who spurned a lover, driving her to her death, being haunted by her ghost.
"The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" - a man rides his horse one night into a valley of condemned "living dead" outcasts.
"Bubbling Well Road" - a creepy tale involving high grass, eery laughter, and a well of horror.
"The Man Who Would Be King" - an adventure tale of two rogues who would be kings... and how it all goes wrong.
"The Joker" - a stranger visits a card game.
"The Mark of the Beast" - one of Kipling's most famous horror tales involving the curse of a were-leopard.
"The Recrudescence of Imray" - don't go rummaging through your bungalow ceiling hangings unless you're prepared to find unpleasant things.
"The Finances of the Gods" - a priest tells a story.
"The Finest Story in the World" - a man unknowingly begins to remember his past lives.
"Children of the Zodiac" - they were gods, once.
"The Bridge Builders" - two men eavesdrop on a meeting of gods.
"The Tomb of his Ancestors" - a man is (maybe) reincarnated and (might) ride a ghostly tiger around at night.
"They" - a particularly haunting tale of a country manor and the children that "live" there (for lack of a better word).
"The House Surgeon" - a detective-like story of a sort-of haunting and its resolution.
"Swept and Garnished" - a story of war and the children often caught in the middle.
"Mary Postgate" - a woman hardens in the face of a dying enemy.
"The Wish House" - a woman takes on the ills of the man she loves unrequitedly, made possible by an unknown being in a Wish House.
"The Gardener" - a story of secrets and loss.
"The Eye of Allah" - religious men use a device from the East to identify microbes; they grapple with the religious repercussions of peering into a world they believe wasn't meant for their eyes.
"On the Gate: A Tale of '16" - Heaven gets a dose of bureaucracy; "yet doth He devise means that His banished be not expelled from Him!".
(Some of these interpretations might actually be wrong because of how long it took me to read this and some of the stories did not stay incredibly fresh after I marked them as good and moved on... so, comment away!)

But I highly recommend that you don't take my word for it. Read all the stories. While some of them do, admittedly, drag (to modern readers - though considering Kipling's popularity in his own time they were probably highly entertaining to his contemporaries), they all seem to have hidden little moments that you just have to stumble upon yourself. Kipling is a masterful writer and you'll find it hard not to have reactions to these stories. You may need to pep-talk yourself into finishing this book, but it will be worth it.

Finally, take this: http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/facts...
You're going to need it. My biggest complaint about the collection as a whole is the lack of glossary because, unless you were living in British India or Victorian England, you're probably going to need a bit of reference material.