An encounter with the extraordinary does not happen in our lives every day, but what if the ordinary encounters are where the magic lies? What if adventure awaits you within the pages of a book that you can read on the most ordinary of days, and the room you sit in morphs into an unfamiliar world you get to discover a story at a time? In 14 Thrilling Adventure Stories, selected by Ruskin Bond, adventure is drawn from the multitude of human failings that we can all relate to: vanity, greed, prestige, and curiosity about the unknown. Featuring legendary writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, RL Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, E Nesbit among others, the collection brings together stories that are strikingly different, yet they all leave behind questions about the characters and to some extent, our own selves, that outlast the final page.
A few stories like O Henry’s ‘A Retrieved Reformation’, Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Golden Touch’ reveal how the choices we make and the desires we keep hidden have the power to tilt our whole world upside down, without giving us a choice. These stories use irony and satire to remind us how dangerous it can be to become prisoners of one’s own pretensions.
While these stories take on more from reality, there are stories where the boundary between illusion and reality gets magically blurred. HG Wells’s ‘The Magic Shop’ tests an adult’s cynicism, with a child’s pure wonder about a delightful reality that he doesn’t need to understand. ‘The Psammead’ by E Nesbit gives a comical twist to the consequences of getting wishes fulfilled, literally. In these stories, uncertainty about the world is tinged with wonder and curiosity.
The supernatural stories in this collection become a setting for larger reflection on moral ambiguity, fear, and the order of nature. A few others take a satirical dig at the social vanity of humans, highlighting the extent to which we are willing to go to achieve a petty motive. The adventure in these stories is as potent.
The stories in this collection have been written in different periods and for different audiences, and they do not share a single conception of adventure; these differences are the strength of this anthology. 14 Thrilling Adventure Stories presents adventure not as a monolithic genre, but reveals its different forms. Adventure can be a collision with the supernatural, but it can also be the strength it takes to change yourself; it can be a satire on society or dealing with the consequences of your own desires. These stories give readers an opportunity to question their own assumptions while enjoying the pleasure of storytelling.