Strange Tales

Dwarfed by Rudyard Kipling’s more popular works, his Strange Tales, as collected in this uneven anthology in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural series, are often overlooked. Of the twenty stories, the handful that are set in colonial India quite effectively evoke an advancing sense of doom and dread through Kipling’s chillingly atmospheric writing style. These display an added sense of mystery and foreboding as ominous Indian spirits, customs, and superstition are laced within the tales. But beyond just the Indian customs, simply setting many of these stories in India adds a solid layer of intrigue and suspension of disbelief for the reader, and this must have been particularly true for readers at the time of show more original publication around the turn of the twentieth century; supernatural occurrences in a mysterious foreign land, rather than your familiar surroundings, somehow seem just a bit more plausible. Take, for example, the opening lines of “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”:

There is, as the conjurers say, no deception about this tale. Jukes by accident stumbled upon a village that is well known to exist, though he is the only Englishman who has been there. A somewhat similar institution used to flourish on the outskirts of Calcutta, and there is a story that if you go into the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart of the Great Indian Desert, you shall come across not a village but a town where the Dead who did not die but may not live have established their headquarters.

In general, the remaining stories, those set in England, are rather tepid and forgettable in comparison. It seems that Kipling drew far greater inspiration from the exotic lands than from his native land, although the couple of stories inspired by the horrors of World War I are clearly heartfelt and intriguing. show less

This collection presents the best of Kipling's 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.