The House of Strange Stories - Ruskin Bond - ★★★

AUTHOR: Ruskin Bond + Others.

GENRE: Anthology, Suspense-Mystery.

RATING: 3.1 Stars.

In a Nutshell: If not one story herein could terrify a scaredy-cat such as Yours Truly, it certainly doesn’t work as a horror collection. It is still somewhat entertaining if you go in with the right expectations.

“With The House of Strange Stories, celebrated writer Ruskin Bond brings forth a collection of some of the most blood-curdling tales ever written. […] these tales of macabre, suspense, vampires, and haunted houses will leave even horror fans terrified.”

Thus declares the blurb. And that’s what killed my experience because the tall promise doesn’t even come close to fulfilment.

I do not enjoy full-length horror novels, but have begun to relish short stories in this genre since a couple of years now. But I don’t consider myself an attuned horror reader. In other words, it is still possible to scare me and give me nightmares. So the blurb create some delicious expectations in my mind. However, only one of the stories sent a tiny shiver down the spine. (Albeit for the wrong reason – animal brutality. 😢) The rest were mostly like mystery shorts, read quickly and forgotten easily, with very few memorable exceptions.

The collection contains twenty-one stories, of which fourteen are written by Ruskin Bond—also the editor of this anthology—and the remaining seven are by renowned classic writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe.

Let’s talk about Bond’s stories first. Every avid Indian reader is aware of Ruskin Bond. Almost every Indian urban reader has read at least one Ruskin Bond work, whether a novel or a short story. Therefore, it is almost sacrilegious to say this: his short fiction is predictable after a point. Once you are familiar with a few of his stories, you can predict the pattern of most of his suspense tales much in advance. This doesn’t take away anything from the lushness of his prose; he is a master at bringing the hills of Mussoorie alive with his penchant for stringing words together. As is typical of Bond, he inserts himself in many of his stories, leaving us to wonder where the line blurs between fact and fiction. But a horror story needs a balance of suspense and spooks to make an impact, both of which were present only randomly in his stories of this collection.

The seven classics are much better in terms of impact, while being much longer in terms of word count. The classics take up about 60% of the book though they are only 33% of the index. Except for Bram Stoker’s work (The Squaw), none of the tales qualify as true horror. The stories again work much better as tales of crime and mystery.

I must highlight one thing here. The editor did not promise us a horror anthology. In his introductory note, Bond mentions that “strange” doesn’t necessarily indicate horror but that it is “the difference between real and imaginary which makes for strange territory.” In terms of strangeness, some of the stories do work decently. But the blurb ended up exaggerating the horror feature, and this resulted in a disappointment.

As always, I rated the stories individually. Initially, I tried to rate based on the ‘fear factor’, and when that didn’t work, I switched to rating in terms of strangeness. That also didn’t fix the problem. The stories remained adamantly and disappointingly impactless. Only five of the twenty-one tales managed to reach/cross the four star mark for me. These were my favourites:

👻 A Job Well Done – Ruskin Bond – Where a haughty master gets his due. I always enjoy underdog stories. - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫

👻 Eyes of the Cat – Ruskin Bond – Not scary as such, but I liked how it developed from normal to thrilling - 🌟🌟🌟🌟

👻 The perfect murder –Stacy Aumônier – Though long, well-written and entertaining. Enjoyed the ending. - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫

👻 The Red-Headed League - Arthur Conan Doyle – Classic Sherlock! How can one go wrong with one of his most popular stories? - 🌟🌟🌟🌟

👻 The Lodger - Marie Belloc Lowndes – Reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. The ending was a bit hurried, but the rest of the story was superb. - 🌟🌟🌟🌟

That said, the Ruskin Bond stories might work better for those who don’t know his writing. Many of his stories in this collection were already familiar to me through other anthologies. (His publishers in India have a bad habit of printing the same stories in multiple anthologies, changing the book titles such that we don’t even realise which collection has which tales. For instance, four of the stories in this collection are also a part of ‘A Room of Many Colours’, which is a children’s anthology!)

Still recommended, but not to horror aficionados. If you like reading mystery anthologies and are equally fond of classic and contemporary works, this might work for you.

3.1 stars, based on the average of my rating for each story.

This collection is available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers.