Strange Tales

Edited and With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies 'Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man' Rudyard Kipling, celebrated author of The Jungle Book, the Just So Stories and other entertaining fictions, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark imaginings. This collection presents the best of these 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. AUTHOR: Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. In 1982 he started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems ? notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) ? which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England the following year. In 1901 Kim appeared and was followed in 1902 by the Just So Stories. Tales of every kind ? including historical and science fiction ? continued to flow from his pen, but Kim is generally thought to be his greatest long work, putting him high among the chroniclers of British expansion. He was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936 and his autobiographical Something of Myself was published the following year.