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Title: The Burial of the Rats
Author: Bram Stoker
Narrator: James Langton
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr and 3 mins
Language: English
Release date: 02-15-13
Publisher: Harmonic Wave
Genres: Classics, European Literature
Publisher's Summary:
A young man who was exiled from his love for one year due to the wishes of her parents, finds himself in Paris. With not much else to do to pass his time, having seen most of the city and its suburbs, he begins exploring further away from Paris itself. His wanderings lead him to a strange, dusty village and into the dangerous house of an even stranger couple.
At first he is thoroughly entertained by the conversation the odd old woman has to offer him, and even more engrossed once her strange husband joins the conversation as well. But soon he is overwhelmed by discomfort and realizes that there is something not right about the situation. As he finds himself fleeing for his life, he discovers the eery occurrence of burial by rats.
About the author: Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish writer of novels and short stories, most famous for his gothic horror novel Dracula. Although he wrote throughout his life while working as a personal assistant and theatre manager, he did not achieve much literary fame until after his death.
Members Reviews:
More Stoker
Extremely atmospheric and scarily written ghost story, and I am amazed that it is not more known or that it hasn't been filmed, when I look at some of the crap that is being paraded out as horror nowadays
An Englishman exploring France runs across an old woman who ...
An Englishman exploring France runs across an old woman who took a part in the revolution, and hears a story about sewer rats eating bodies to the bone in minutes. The Englishman soon gets firsthand experience when he flees from the woman and her accomplices into the sewers, narrowly escaping, returning with the police to find just bones.
This is...meh. If you're scared of rats, this is going to leave you edging away from every sewer drain, but if you don't have that fear, it's just a lackluster horror story.
This story is in the public domain. I listened to an audio production from Librivox.
Good thing Stoker "dug himself out" early
It is clearly evident that Stoker wrote this short story years and years before writing Dracula. The premise is promising: a sinister group of very old, creepy, and practically corpse-like soldiers are out to get the handsome, young hero. However, Stoker did not do much to develop the plot line. Why are these people out to get the protagonist? Why did their leader, a morbid old woman, tell him stories about herself before "unleashing" her henchmen upon him? Why did she keep looking at a ring he wore? After a chase scene that went on for pages and pages, the abrupt ending of this story was unsatisfactory and left all these questions unanswered. Thankfully, Stoker's writing abilities improved throughout the years, allowing him to write masterpieces such as "Dracula" and "Jewel of the Seven Stars".