Beasts and Super-Beasts

Saki's world is one where therawing rhythms of nature invariably crash through the thin veneer of Edwardian civilization, and the beasts always, always have the last laugh. This collection gathers his most notorious short fiction: stories where a boy's worshipped ferret becomes an object of genuine terror, where two feuding landowners are trapped together in a snowstorm by the very forest they'd been fighting over, where theanimals in question may or may not be metaphorical. Saki writes with the precision of a scalpel and the delight of someone who finds hypocrisy genuinely obscene. His Edwardian socialites are grotesque in their complacency, and his endings arrive with the quiet satisfaction of a trap snapping shut. The world he depicts is elegant, cruel, and very funny. He died in WWI at forty-five, which lends these stories an unexpected poignancy: portraits of a world that was about to be obliterated, rendered here in prose as precise and deadly as the artillery that would silence him. For readers who want their satire with teeth and their short fiction to bite back.