‘The Mark of the Beast’ – Rudyard Kipling

While there seems to be no such thing as a bad Clark Ashton Smith story, I’ve got a feeling that too many more of these (on the blog) will get a little boring. I thought I’d mix things up a little then with a short story from a writer that I never thought I’d see on a genre blog, let alone this one…

As a boy, I was encouraged to read Rudyard Kipling, something that I fought against (a lot) because, well… He wasn’t a fantasy writer, was he? Well, apart from all the talking animals I guess but even so… I just wasn’t that interested and there were loads of other books that I actually wanted to read so I went off and read them instead. Until, a little while ago.

The last time I collected the Fantasy Masterworks series, I was very surprised to come across a collection of Rudyard Kipling tales. Not surprised enough to actually read it and certainly not surprised enough to keep hold of the book when I was culling my collection ahead of a move. This blog though, is a little different to past blogs of mine so when I started collecting the Fantasy Masterworks series again, I made sure to grab myself a copy that was going cheap. Where to start reading though? Well, the book is called ‘The Mark of the Beast’ so that particular short story seemed like as good a place to start as any…

We’ve all had nights out where the journey home has involved a little drunken vandalism, haven’t we? I have. I’m not making any judgments here, just saying that it’s more likely to happen than not. Most of us though, will draw the line at desecrating a religious building though, no matter how drunk we are. Not so with one Fleete, who thinks it’s a good idea to stub the remnants of his cigar out on a statue of Hanuman, the Monkey God. ‘The Mark of the Beast’ he calls it, a priest is about to put his own mark on Fleete though, a mark that will herald an awful transformation…

I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what to expect from ‘The Mark of the Beast’, having only read ‘The Jungle Book’ (under duress)as a kid. What I got was vaguely unsettling, rather than chilling, but was still a perfectly serviceable horror tale; a nice quick read that sorted me out at the end of a day (yesterday) that wasn’t one of my better ones. If there was any horror in ‘The Mark of the Beast’, it came out in Kipling’s attitudes towards the native Indians. I was a little prepared for this and so was quite surprised to see Kipling initially play down the ‘colonial bits’ of his tale, even going so far as to say that some of the things people did were bad. I wasn’t expecting that but it was refreshing to see (although calling the natives of the Sudan ‘Fuzzies’ undid some of that good work). I even appreciated the slightly moralistic approach where the boarish Fleete gets his just desserts for doing something sacrilegious. You don’t mess with people’s culture and get away with it and it was good to see that approach taken here. What wasn’t so good though was a couple of white guys torturing the priest to persuade him to lift the curse… You don’t see it but you know that it’s happening and you know full well what the torture instruments are. Not only did it feel like Kipling chickened out of really exploring the consequences of Fleete’s actions, it really felt like Kipling had changed his mind and was saying that it was ok for white folk to just barge in and do things their way after all. I get that people want to save their friends but the way it panned out here didn’t sit well. I know the ‘of it’s time’ argument but I’d say that ‘not being a dick to people’ is also ‘of its time’…

It's a shame that ‘The Mark of the Beast’ turned out like this as there are things to recommend it. Fleete’s gradual transformation in particular really works with unsettling imagery setting up a ‘race against time’ that fuels the tension of the plot. That’s what kept me going here. I’ve got the book now so you’ll probably see a few more of Kipling’s stories feature here, I’ll be reading them with some reservations though. If you fancy it, you can read ‘The Mark of the Beast’ Here…