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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Mar 2, 2023 13:05:43 GMT
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 3, 2023 15:50:05 GMT
THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW & other EERIE TALES
THEY by Rudyard KiplingāI have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,ā I answered. āThen it must be as bad as being blind.āā This wonderfully hidden-in-plain-sight, oblique, but not opaque, story is a blend of Walter de la Mare stories as blessed with a gentle kiss for the readerās hand by much of the English ghost story tradition, as its narrator loses his way in his car near the Sussex downs and finds this large house and a blind woman (āā¦but we blindies have only one skin, I thinkā) and the children in the house and grounds ā¦ and twice again the narrator does this act of getting lost there. Indeed, his car breaks down āIn fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first.ā Foiled by events (āIt was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles;ā) in the vicinity of the house, events such as a local childās sickness and crude business tally-sticks and even speaking the N word to make the story shrink in plain sight instead of merely hiding in it. But that takes little account of the ācoloursā the blind woman sees. āā¦.distorting afresh the distorted shadows, [ā¦] She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.ā |
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Post by ripper on Aug 5, 2023 20:27:37 GMT
THE PHANTOM 'RICKSHAW & other EERIE TALES
THEY by Rudyard KiplingāI have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,ā I answered. āThen it must be as bad as being blind.āā This wonderfully hidden-in-plain-sight, oblique, but not opaque, story is a blend of Walter de la Mare stories as blessed with a gentle kiss for the readerās hand by much of the English ghost story tradition, as its narrator loses his way in his car near the Sussex downs and finds this large house and a blind woman (āā¦but we blindies have only one skin, I thinkā) and the children in the house and grounds ā¦ and twice again the narrator does this act of getting lost there. Indeed, his car breaks down āIn fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first.ā Foiled by events (āIt was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles;ā) in the vicinity of the house, events such as a local childās sickness and crude business tally-sticks and even speaking the N word to make the story shrink in plain sight instead of merely hiding in it. But that takes little account of the ācoloursā the blind woman sees. āā¦.distorting afresh the distorted shadows, [ā¦] She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.ā I was impressed when I first read the story in an anthology put together by, I think, Susan Hill. I re-read it not too long ago and enjoyed it just as much. Quite different to the Indian Raj based supernatural tales he wrote. Published in 1904, this must be one of the earliest stories of the macabre to feature a car in a prominent role. |
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