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    The Mark of the Beast (Cryptofiction Classics)
    The Mark of the Beast (Cryptofiction Classics)
    The Mark of the Beast (Cryptofiction Classics)
    Ebook28 pages19 minutes

    The Mark of the Beast (Cryptofiction Classics)

    By Rudyard Kipling

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    About this ebook

    This early work by Rudyard Kipling was originally published in 1890 and we are now republishing it as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'The Mark of the Beast' is a short story about a desecrated statue of a monkey god and a priest sick with leprosy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateDec 12, 2014
    ISBN9781473399143
    The Mark of the Beast (Cryptofiction Classics)
    Author

    Rudyard Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and its sequel, as well as Captains Courageous. He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.

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      Book preview

      The Mark of the Beast (Cryptofiction Classics) - Rudyard Kipling

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

      Introduction

      The Mark of the Beast

      Rudyard Kipling

      The Mark of the Beast

      By Rudyard Kipling

      A Cryptofiction Classic

      Introduction

      The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

      Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden – cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

      Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous

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