Mark of the Beast

Returning to the horror story genre again and again during the first 20 years of his literary career, Rudyard Kipling produced a substantial body of work in the genre. This collection includes 17 of the best of these tales.Written in Kipling’s vigorous, plain-spoken manner and gathered together for the first time in one volume, the stories vary widely in tone, style, and subject matter — from comic ghost stories (“Haunted Subalterns”) to grim tales of psychological terror (“The Wandering Jew”)to chilling stories of the returning dead (“The Lost Legion”). Also included are the title story, widely considered Kipling’s most accomplished horror tale; “The Dream of Duncan Parrenness,” the author’s first tale of the supernatural; “The City of Dreadful Night,” a brooding prose poem; “The Phantom Rickshaw,” a forbidding tale of a man haunted by the ghost of a woman he jilted; “At the End of the Passage,” which poignantly conveys the loneliness and homesickness felt by many English civil servants in India; and nine other compelling works.Selected, introduced, and edited by occult fiction authority S. T. Joshi, these tales will be welcomed by horror story fans and devotees of the celebrated English author.