In a message dated 18/05/99 10:57:22 GMT Daylight Time, Professor Tim Connell
([log in to unmask]) writes to Roger Ayers ([log in to unmask]):
> Many thanks for such a prompt and detailed reply.
> What I had in my mind though is that K. is well known for his animal
> stories, colonial stories, engineering stories etc. But people do not
> think of him as a ghost-story writer - or do they?
Dear Professor Connell,
In his Preface to the first printing of 'The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie
Tales' in the Indian Railway Library series (1888), Kipling says ' This is
not exactly a book of real ghost stories, as the cover makes believe, but
rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves'.
I don't think Kipling ever wrote explicitly of the existence of a ghost, but
he wrote stories throughout his life where he came close to it but 'the facts
never quite explained themselves'. I think that this prevents him from being
considered a 'ghost story writer' but, as in many other categories of
writing, he wrote several stories which might well be included in an
anthology of such fiction.
Another category you might have mentioned in your list was sience fiction -
his 'With the Night Mail' is the first story in 'One Hundred Years of Science
Fiction' edited by Damon Knight, just such an anthology.
Yours, Roger Ayers
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