Sredni Vashtar is a chilling little story from the pen of a master of Edwardian fiction, Hector Hugh Monro, better known by his pseudonym, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saki" target="_blank">Saki</a>. It's a short tale from his collection <em><a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3401" target="_blank">The Chronicles of Clovis</a></em>. The link I gave in the last sentence takes you to an excellent free edition on the superb <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/" target="_blank">Feedbooks.com</a> site and includes an epub version for those of you with an ereader that can take such stuff. You can find the story on Page 45.

If you're new to Saki you're in for a treat. If you haven't read him in a while, ditto. Sredni Vashtar is a simple little tale. A sickly young boy called Conradin has a nasty guardian, Mrs de Ropp, who mistreats him. Not that Saki, being a good Edwardian, would allow this to be made plain in print. Instead he simply records, 'Mrs. de Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him "for his good" was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome.'

<!--more-->

Conradin loves but two things in his life: his pet Houdan hen and a polecat-ferret which the strange child worships as a kind of god. Mrs de Ropp sells the hen. This is not a good idea.

There are many reasons to admire Saki, for his imagination, his narrative skill, and his exploration of a broad range of styles and subjects, everything from domestic drama and romance to the darker fringes of pure horror. But it's his voice I always remember, crystal clear, sardonic and irredeemably cruel. His opinion of Edwardian society is stark and unforgiving. Behind the delicate, studied language there always seems to be a hatred of the world he sees, one some believe stemmed from Monro's personal nature; he may have been homosexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The fate of his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, may have played on Monro. It's not hard to imagine Wilde's own voice in some of these tales.

I'm not sure how you'd categorise <em>Sredni Vashtar</em>. It's subtle, creepy, and darkly funny in a deeply cruel way. Horror? Macabre? Fantasy? It doesn't really matter. Saki swapped authorial hats at will. Why should readers, a century later, care? Why, indeed, should we be so obsessed with placing labels on stories? It seemed irrelevant to Saki. I wish more of us felt that way today.

Saki had an extraordinary life... and death. Born to colonial parents in Burma he worked as a policeman there before becoming a journalist in London, working for a while as a foreign correspondent for <em>The Morning Post.</em> He then settled in London and began to write short stories for newspapers. At the outbreak of the First World War he joined up, though at forty three he was over age, refusing a commission to enlist as an ordinary soldier. In 1916 he was killed by a sniper.

His last words, supposedly, were, 'Put that bloody cigarette out!' It would have made a great line in one of his stories too.