Unnerving Short Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I have known for a long time that there are two basic views of Rudyard Kipling:

1.      Rudyard Kipling the author of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories…thus, a children’s author.

2.      Rudyard Kipling, author of The White Man’s Burden…thus, a racist.

The Kipling I met when reading the collection Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror & Fantasy (edited by Stephen Jones) was bits of both, yet neither.

While I prefer novels where I can really settle into a world and get to know the people that live there, I have recently begun to appreciate one aspect of short stories: collections of one author can showcase the broad spectrum of their talents, and thus reveal more of themselves.

I might not have considered reading this collection, had it not been at a library book sale for a more than reasonable price (I could not have spent more than a dollar on it) and in almost-new condition. However, I admit that its title (particularly the Horror part) delayed me from reading it, and so it sat looking at me reproachfully from my bookcase for a couple years before I ventured between its covers.

The thing about Victorian horror is that it relies on atmosphere and suggestion more than gruesome descriptions of grisly gore. In this case, Kipling’s “horror” is often derived from legends and superstitions, often drawn from his experiences in British-colonized India. Such stories as the more commonly-known, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw, but also including In the House of Suddhoo, The Mark of the Beast, and, of course An Indian Ghost in England.

“A-ha!” cry the proponents of Kipling Interpretation No. 2.

Well aware of this interpretation, I was watching out for, and in many cases saw, the sort of stereotypes and preconceptions and the British Empirical superiority complex that tarnishes many a good Victorian tale in the modern reader’s estimation. And, while I really have no desire to argue against this interpretation, I do have one observation:

In quite a few of the horror stories of this book that feature stereotypes of “superstitious and fearful natives,” the self-described rational British characters usually end up being even MORE superstitious and fearful by the end of the story, and the “natives” are usually proven right in their estimation of what is happening.

With that out of the way, allow me to move on to Kipling Interpretation No. 3, in which Kipling is, to an extent, all that he is assumed to be, but also much more. His range of imagination, his capacity for writing truly scary, genuinely funny, indescribably uncomfortable, and surreal speculative fiction, was evident and astonishing. In Children of the Zodiac he practically accomplishes the creation of an entirely unique mythology. He dabbles in futuristic science fiction in With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD and As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD. Then there is the almost Twain-ish The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat and The Finest Story in the World (the latter of which having some rather amusing in-jokes of a writer) and the sad gothic ghost story ‘They’.

Frankly, if I hadn’t already been aware of it, I would not have guessed that this variety pack of genre, Style, and tone had all been penned by the same person.

Usually these sorts of omnibus publications—generally compiled using unknown, public domain works that can be cheaply cobbled together and peddled as “classics” because they’re bound in hardcover—are rather forgettable on the inside. Many of them are replete with typos. Quite a few, in my experience, have been a collection of castoffs, of second-best works that are (all things considered) understandably forgettable and forgotten. While I can’t say with certainty that there are NO typos or problems of this kind, Tales of Horror and Fantasy nevertheless seems a cut above its peers, with both an introduction by fantasy author Neil Gaiman and a succinctly biographical afterword written by the editor.

In short, it was a dollar well-spent.