Customer Reviews

The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Stories

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RKRTOG/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_img

Kipling had one thing in common with Fox Mulder--he wanted to believe. But he never seemed quite sure of WHAT he wanted to believe. This collection of short stories, most of them published in British India during his stay there before he returned to England the long way around, have been called thoroughly realistic.

The stories are powerful, but he always manages to punch holes in the ghost story before the story ends. His sister was a trance medium who was once involved in a complex three-cornered correspondence--that means that three different mediums, who theoretically do not know one another and have no interaction, each receive part of the message, which must then be assembled by the researchers. He wanted to believe in survival after death, especially after the death of his favorite daughter followed years later by the World War I death of his only son, eighteen years old and as blind as Kipling without his glasses.

But when he wrote this book, these tragedies had not yet occurred, and most of the stories end happily. Some, though, do not. Go and read the book. You'll be glad you did.

Lots of very entertaining, fast reading stories, all but one being about service in British India of some sort. The best one, set in England, was about a man who could remember being a galley slave in a previous life. This volume contains "The Man Who Would Be King", a not very good story. Kudos to the person who made a wonderful movie from it with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Almost all the stories are told from the point of view of the narrator telling someone else's story. Not a few have to do with ghosts and the mysticism of India, which is generally portrayed as a hot, dry, dusty, rather miserable country. A great deal of men and women dying in his stories, also one child. They are good reading, but not at all humorous. All the principles usually work for the British government in civil service positions.

I have to admit, first, that I am a huge fan of Kipling's writing. Not of the Just So stories - but of the wonderful adventure sagas and short stories written for adults. They are not written for 20th century sensibilities, they are not politically correct. You have to keep in mind this is a man writing in the late 1800s and early 1900s stories that are current with his times. Yes, the British considered themselves superior to every other race then. That doesn't make the stories any less true, exciting, interesting and compelling. I also don't really know why they called it a collection of ghost stories. Stories of the strange, frightening and bizarre perhaps - stories I think today we might call horror stories instead.

Of the stories collected here, I would say only The Phantom Rickshaw is really what I would consider a ghost story - and a rousing good one it is, too. A young man is haunted by a woman he treated wrongly. Isn't that what vengeful ghosts do?

I enjoyed "The Man Who Would Be King" - but I like imaginative adventure stories where the fantastic is just believable enough that it might be true. I'm not quite sure how it wound up in this collection.

The story about the living dead community actually is quite believable and may well be true or at least based on a true tale. It is "a fate worse than death"...

The last story, set in London, is a little sad. A young man brims with imagination and ambitions - or is it all imagination? This is a story about the memory of past lives, rather than a ghost story and it makes a very good point about why "the door is closed" and we are not allowed to recall past lives.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a great deal and will treasure it in my collection.