Horrors Next Door: Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore translated by Prasun Roy
My take on the book:
Horrors Next Door is collection of eight short stories written originally by Rabindranath Tagore that are translated by Prasun Roy. While we all know about the more famous works of Tagore, this collection is about the lesser known ones. This book brings together all eight of Tagore’s horror stories for the very first time, making it a genuinely unique collector’s edition for lovers of Indian literature and horror fiction.
The premise of this anthology is itself a revelation; most readers who have grown up reading Tagore’s Gitanjali or his celebrated short stories of domestic life would be surprised to read this genre. These eight stories span the psychological, the supernatural, and the deeply unsettling, and together they prove the writer understood fear just as much as he understood love.
The translator does a fantastic job as he understands not only the literary weight of what Tagore wrote, but also the cultural and historical significance behind these stories. Prasun Roy uses simple language and vivid descriptions along with lucid dialogues to bring life into the characters. The translator retains the charm of the orignal story telling without modernising it to current times, as the settings remain rooted in colonial Bengal
The horror is never loud, there are no jump-scare moments and no gore. Instead the horror seeps in through everyday scenarios like a familiar house, a beloved object, a beloved face. Stories like Monihara (The Lost Jewels) and Kankal (The Skeleton) are not merely ghost stories, they are studies of obsession, repression, and the weight of the unspoken. The collection works remarkably well as a whole precisely because the eight stories share a common thread that horror is never truly external. The ghosts are always reflections of something the living carry within themselves: guilt, grief, greed, or longing.
A haunting anthology that does full justice to a largely unexplored dimension of India’s greatest writers, Horrors Next Door is a must-read for anyone who loves literary horror, Bengali literature, or simply a good story that lingers long after the last page is turned.
My rating:
4/5.