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Saki
Oct 9, 2008 1:43:44 GMT
Post by dem bones on Oct 9, 2008 1:43:44 GMT
Saki - Humor, Horror & The Supernatural (Scholastic, Dec. 1974) Gabriel-Ernest The Bag Tobermory Mrs. Packletide's Tiger Sredni Vashtar The Easter Egg Filboid Studge Laura The Open Window The Schartz-Matterklume Method A Holiday Task The Storyteller The Name Day The Lumber Room The Disappearance of Crisping Umberleigh The Wolves of Cernogratz The Guests The Penance The Interlopers The Mappined Life The Seven Cream Jugs The Gala ProgrammeBlurb: Tobermory - the cat that listened .... and talked! Gabriel-Ernest - the handsome young werewolf! Sredni Vashtar - a living dream of revenge! At his best, "Saki'"s withering sarcasm borders on the sadistic as he gleefully unleashes his 'beasts and superbeasts' on the frightfully proper middle classes, often, it seems, for no better reason than because - he can! The best of his stories are brief affairs and don't really lend themselves to lazy synopsis - for example, I found The Open Window laugh out loud funny, but you'd not realise it from my notes (watch out for Vera who could teach even Wednesday Addams a thing or two about being a little monster!). 'Saki' was the pen-name of H. H. Munro (1870-1916), yet another great Brit horror author who lost his life in World War I. Reputedly, his last recorded words (before a sniper's bullet ended his life) were "Put that bloody cigarette out!" The Interlopers: Carpathian Mountains. Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym are sworn enemies, continuing a family feud over ownership of the forest that has lasted generations. One stormy night they face each other in the wood, but before either can strike a fatal blow a huge tree falls pinioning both men to the ground. As they await rescue they make their peace and each man prays that his own people reach them first that he can insist they free the other before him. At last they can discern figures in the mist loping toward them …. Sredni Vashtar: Conradin, lonely and frequently ill, despises his cousin and guardian Mrs. De Ropp with a passion. All he has in the world is his hen, a polecat-ferret and a vivid imagination. It’s the latter that allows him to build a religious cult around the ferret which he names Sredni Vashtar and worships with offerings of nutmegs and a “paeon of victory and destruction”. Mrs. De Ropp - who enjoys tormenting her charge - sells the hen and now she’s discovered Sredni’s hutch hidden away in the garden shed. With the boy banished to the house under the watchful eye of the servants, can his God save itself? The Easter Egg: Much to his mother, Lady Barbara's shame, Lester Slaggby is a timid creature, ever keen to avoid even the remotest possibility of personal injury. Naturally, Saki sees to it that, when an explosive is concealed inside the Easter egg a little girl is to present to the Burgomaster, Lester is the only person in the crowd who realises that he's in the presence of an unwitting infant suicide bomber (!). Showing remarkable courage, Lester leaps into the fray, only to become involved in an ungainly wrestle with the child (who's been promised sweets after all). An outrageously cruel six pager. Gabriel-Ernest: Van Cheele learns the inadvisability of inviting a feral child of the woods into your nice suburban home - particularly one who who brags of hunting on all fours and living on child flesh. His aunt makes an even greater miscalculation when she asks ‘Gabriel-Ernest’ to escort the Toop kids home from Sunday School classes. Saki’s typically mocking take on the werewolf theme continues his gleeful persecution of the middle classes. The Open Window: Mr. Nutter has been sent convalescing in the country to ease his nerves, so the last thing he needs is sweet little Vera confiding her dear aunt’s “tragedy” which leaves her clinging to the belief that one day her husband and two brothers will return from their resting place on the treacherous moor and step through the open window as though nothing happened. The Wolves Of Cernogratz: When a member of the Cernogratz family dies it is said that all the wolves come down from the hills to mourn them and a great tree falls in the forest at the moment of their passing. The insufferable Countess and her equally arrogant brother don’t believe in either the legend or their old Governess Amalie’s insistence that she is the last of the bloodline. The Music On The Hill: Society Girl Sylvia marries ‘Dead’ Mortimer Seltoun and relocates them in Yessney down Devon way. Farm life suits the hardworking Dead, but Sylvia is restless and scornful of country beliefs. When she snatches the grapes left on a pedestal as an offering to Pan her husband warns her “the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them” and so it proves. She dies in agony with the gloating laughter of Pan ringing in her ears. For 'X', in the hope he will pick up this thread and run with it!
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Saki
Oct 9, 2008 12:06:32 GMT
Post by pulphack on Oct 9, 2008 12:06:32 GMT
i would direct the learned gentleman to a post in the A. J. Alan section that refers to saki, and will save me re-typing the relevant sections...
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Saki
Oct 9, 2008 19:34:37 GMT
Post by jkdunham on Oct 9, 2008 19:34:37 GMT
For 'X', in the hope he will pick up this thread and run with it! Run? I couldn't run if I was on fire and being chased by giant time-travelling badgers. I might manage a bit of a ramble though, if that's any good to you. Yet another Vault spooky moment, that's what we have here. Having dropped old "Sarky" into the conversation yesterday, I woke up this morning fully intending to post something about precisely this book! What, I ask you, are the odds of that happening? Astronomical, that's what they are, so it must clearly be the Devil's Work. We can laugh about it now but it won't seem so funny when the witchfinder comes a-pokin'. But I digress. Yeah, I've had this book for, quite literally, years. Incidentally, my copy says "5th printing... January 1972" and the voices in my head tell me that we'd have to go all the way back to 1965 to find out when it was first published (which was 1965). I suppose we should also give a mention to Janet and Alex D'Amato for that charming cover design. Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to drag anyone who's still reading this back down Memory Cul-de-sac with me. My mother bought me this book from a jumble sale when I was still knee-high to a giant time-travelling badger. I think she thought, "Saki, we'll that's better for him than the rubbish he normally reads". I didn't mind having my cultural expectations raised in the least, she had me at the 'Horror and the Supernatural' bit. I loved it and I still do. Whether this was my first encounter with likes of 'Gabriel-Ernest', 'Sredni Vashtar' and 'Laura', I don't remember now but having them all together in one little book was a real eye-opener. Saki was the man. I particularly liked the fact that it was a little book too. I'm not sure if that comes across in Dem's scan (shown actual size). but these Scholastic jobs were little pocket editions, roughly the same width as an old paperback but not so deep in the crotch as it were. Ideal for sticking in my pocket and carrying around with me everywhere. I also had a little Scholastic Frankenstein but that's another story. I've since upgraded to the Wordsworth Collected Short Stories of Saki, mentioned elsewhere by pulphack. I've long been an admirer of Wordsworth's budget belters, even before they started their splendid 'Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural' line. Their bumper Saki selection (first published in 1993 and more than likely still available) contains his two Reginald books (the second of which includes the first publication in book form of 'Gabriel-Ernest'); The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), probably his two finest collections; and two posthumously published volumes, The Toys of Peace and The Square Egg. Pretty much everything apart from his two novels, a few plays and some political sketches which, like Reginald, he produced while writing for the Westminster Gazette. Picking a favourite story out of that lot is nigh on impossible, though I've always had a bit of thing about 'The Music on the Hill'. There's just something so wonderfully Pagan about it, something ancient which seems to run between the lines. Though no stranger to the horror anthology, it's hard to really categorise his work. Macabre it can be, horrific certainly at times. The unsigned introduction to the Wordsworth book describes his writing as "stories of urbane malice", which would seem to sum up his particular style quite succinctly. If he comes across as slightly pompous at times, he spends at least as much time deflating pomposity in the upper-middle class Edwardian society that surrounded him. He was merciless in his scathing attacks on this 'polite society', whose members generally fare deeply unpleasantly at his hand. It's suggested that some of this vitriol can be traced to his "suppressed homosexuality". Certainly, like Oscar Wilde, he was a master of the barbed epithet. By all accounts his childhood, spent largely in the grip of authoritarian aunts, was a deeply miserable one and it's tempting to read something of the young Hector Munro into the character of 'Sredni Vashtar''s 10-year-old Conradin. To quite what degree his writing was motivated by bitterness and revenge, I couldn't say but many of his beautifully brief tales rank as true classics.
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Saki
Nov 30, 2010 13:58:33 GMT
Post by lemming13 on Nov 30, 2010 13:58:33 GMT
Just finished my Kindle copy of Beasts and Superbeasts, and have to say how much I have relished every story, whether genre or simply social satire. Couldn't read it in one sitting, though - the 'heroic' characters tend to be too relentlessly precocious and obnoxious to bear more than two or three at a time. Damn good stuff, though. I have always loved The Open Window, Sredni Vashtar and all, but The Cobweb is decidedly chilling, and with no hint of an uppity brat. Going back now in search of the Toys of Peace.
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Saki
Nov 30, 2010 18:52:30 GMT
Post by andydecker on Nov 30, 2010 18:52:30 GMT
say, lem, how is life with the Kindle? Is it any good and easy to load other files like word or pdfs?
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Saki
Dec 1, 2010 10:11:06 GMT
Post by lemming13 on Dec 1, 2010 10:11:06 GMT
Loving it, andy; it's been a breeze loading word and pdf files, and I have found lots of sites which offer mobipocket files I can just drag and drop into the device. I've even been tinkering with a collection of Russian tales I'm assembling, using Works, and I've been able to shift that in and out without a hitch. And it can play audio files too, so I stuck some of my old radio downloads in and can listen to them anywhere. Really has opened up a world of out of print material for me.
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Saki
Dec 1, 2010 11:50:57 GMT
Post by andydecker on Dec 1, 2010 11:50:57 GMT
Thanks for the info. I am really torn about this. On one hand I detest this electronic books thingy, on the other hand there are of course good things to do with it, not the least not to have read books on the PC any longer which can be a drag.
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Saki
May 24, 2011 9:40:25 GMT
Post by lemming13 on May 24, 2011 9:40:25 GMT
Just finished Toys of Peace at last, and it was a corker. Some overlaps with the Beasts and Superbeasts, but nothing I can't live with. The Interlopers is a corker, but most of them are more whimsy than horror. The Image of the Lost Soul was very reminiscent of Wilde's fairy tales, very mournful but possibly a sly dig at old Oscar's sentimentality. And I laughed like a drain at the title story - my youngest is being exposed to history of the politically correct kind at school, and with much the same result as the foisting of pc toys on the children in the story. Official Roman history now focuses entirely on villas and roads, so she merrily drew her diagram of a road showing a chariot travelling down it and crushing a passing slave. That's my girl...
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julieh
Crab On The Rampage
One-woman butt-kicking army
Posts: 70
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Saki
Jun 30, 2011 19:06:34 GMT
Post by julieh on Jun 30, 2011 19:06:34 GMT
Huge Saki fan here! I like his "spoooky" stories (Gabriel Ernest and Sredni Vasjhtar, etc) but LOVE his liar stories. Clovis, Vera, the lady in the Schartz-Metterklume method, all of them. Just watching them casually prank people with the most outrageous lies. Makes me wish I had the balls to do the same... ...a little
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