Exclusive Sylvia Plath extract: Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom

A young woman is hustled on to a train by her parents bound for a destination known only as the Ninth Kingdom. An ominous pall of smoke hangs over a landscape dotted with abandoned settlements where the train no longer stops. “It’s the forest fires,” a fellow passenger tells her. “The smoke always blows down from the north this time of year.” Full of little nods towards the uncanny, it could almost be the opening of a Stephen King novel, but “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” is a short story by Sylvia Plath, which was rejected by a magazine when she was a 20-year-old student and has remained largely unseen until now.

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