Читать книгу The Horse Story Megapack - Arthur Conan Doyle - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION: A HORSE IS A HORSE…, by Robert Reginald

The horse has been championed throughout history as a war machine (both armored and as an adjunct to a fast-moving cavalry force), a means of transport (of both men and goods), a source of popular entertainment (racing, performing, and being displayed at shows), an adjunct to farming (plowing and hauling), and, finally, as a true friend and companion. When the American cowboy had no one else with whom he could talk on those long, lonely stretches riding fence, chasing outlaws, or just getting from one place to another in the Old West, he could always find comfort with his true-blue steed, his faithful mount.

So it’s no surprise that writers throughout history have featured the horse prominently in their fiction. Here are twenty-five stories and five poems, including such works as: “Black Beauty,” by Anna Sewell, the quintessential story of a horse’s life; “The Man from Snowy River,” the first of a series of poems by A. B. Paterson; “Gulliver’s Travels: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,” Jonathan Swift’s mordant dissection of human society through the eyes of intelligent, talking horses; and “A Horse’s Tale,” by Mark Twain, another classic of equine literature.

Speaking of classics, Ambrose Bierce’s “A Horseman in the Sky” provides us with a gripping glimpse of the American Civil War—and of the role of the soldier’s horse therein; “He Walked Around the Horses,” by H. Beam Piper, is an alternate history of Europe occasioned by an encounter with…a horse; the chilling horror classic, “The Horse of the Invisible,” by William Hope Hodgson, is part of his Carnacki the Ghost-Finder series. Among modern writers, Mark E. Burgess relates “My First Horse Surgery,” and Mary Wickizer Burgess contributes the poignant “Heart Bar Johnny.” We even have a Sherlock Holmes mystery!

There’s something here for every lover of our equine cousins. And I’m happy to say that there’ll be a SECOND HORSE MEGAPACK!

—Robert Reginald & Mary Wickizer Burgess, 3 August 2013