The Rider on the White Horse begins as a ghost story. A traveler finds himself caught in rough weather. On an island just offshore he glimpses the specter of a rider on a white horse rising and plunging in the wind and rain. Taking shelter at a local inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and the local schoolmaster volunteers a story. It is a tale of ambition; of love and family; and of politics. It is a story, too, about the crisis of faith, of wanting and missing the presence of the divine, and of the persistence of superstition. It is an appealingly matter-of-fact picture of rural life, a harrowing glimpse of spiritual isolation, and a stark vision of the violence of the natural world. Finally, it is a story about the basis of civilization in the act of human sacrifice. Theodor Storm's novella is a gripping dramatization of the bloody reckonings that lie beneath the surface of civilization.