I don’t want to hijack this thread talking about twist endings.
One of my favorite authors of short stories, Saki, is mentioned, so I wondered, how many fans of this author are there on the SDMB?
I read one of his stories “The Interlopers” in a high school textbook, and went to find more. I got hooked enough that one of my current cats is name Tobermory, for a cat in a story of the same name.
Some of my other favorites are “The Toys of Peace” a story about trying to make children play in a civilized fashion. It’s just as good now as it was when first written. Then there’s “The Un-Rest Cure”, “The Schartz-Metterlume Method”, “Gabriel-Ernest”, and, of course, the famous “Sredni Vashtar”
Surprised you haven’t mentioned my favorite, “The Open Door.” I even allude to it in my own least-unknown published story, which begins “Like Saki’s heroine, I specialize in romance at short notice. In other words, I’m a harmless but dedicated liar…”
I love Saki. You’ve already picked a few classics. I also love “The Lumber Room,” “Tobermory” (exactly what a real talking cat would be like), “The Open Window,” and “The Story of the Great Weep.”
I’d like to meet someone like Clovis, although I’d be rather wary around him.
I’ve seen “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” dramatized on an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock, and someone told me the show did “Srendi Vashtar” as well. Now that would be an eery one. Saki often sounded as if he could be writing for “The Twilight Zone”, although of course the stories came before television.
I inherited a book of his short stories from my mom. Srendi Vashtar is awesome. I also loved the story in which a boy who’s in disgrace is left behind with his aunt while his siblings go to the beach. His aunt ends up getting trapped in the garden somehow, and asks the boy for help. The boy points out that he has been told never to go into the garden under any circumstances, and surmises that the voice asking for help is really the Devil trying to get him to misbehave.
I do like Saki, even if he was horribly racist and sexist (he did write one where women suffragettes were fed to the lions for trying to get the right to vote).
However, “Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped” is one of the most prophetic stories ever, and I liked quite a few
“The Open Window” is great if you understand the final line, which mean something different his his day. (“Romance”=“storytelling.”)
I love Saki. “Louise” contains one of my favorite puns of all time:
“…she said, ‘She’s leaving her present house and going to Lower Seymour Street.’ ‘I dare say she will, if she stays there long enough’, I said. Ada didn’t see it for about three minutes, and then she was positively uncivil.”
Others I’ve read and re-read: “The Brogue”, “The Quest”, “Filboid Studge, or the Story of a Mouse that Helped”, “The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope”, and for a change of pace from comedy, “The Interlopers” and “The Easter Egg”.
Racism and sexism are words you could throw at most older writers and have some of it stick.It’s a rather pointless exercise, unless you actually intend only to read those authors who pass some sort of litmus test of correct attitudes.
Personally, I couldn’t give a hoot what a writer did or believed; I’m reading his books not cultivating his friendship.
And I’ve loved Saki ever since discovering him in a library in the 60s.
Heh, oddly enough my brother the high school English teacher was just talking about this story the other night; apparently it’s in a book he uses.
I’m sure my first exposure to Saki was in some school anthology/textbook or other (maybe first “The Open Window” or “The Story Teller”); they’d often include one of his stories, which would typically be one of the most fun ones in the whole book. And thanks to this I went and got his complete works.
My goodness, I’d forgotten about that thread Thudlow Boink! But it never hurts to go over the same ground again, since we have many new posters in the last three years.
Now I need to make a reminder for myself, for 2009.
The last sentence in “Tobermory” made me thing of Mark Twain, of all things, and his essay “The Awful German Language”.
When I was ten years old, I discovered both Lovecraft and Saki while I was rummaging around in some old books in the garage. I owe a lot to the influence of Lovecraft and Saki. They gave me a taste for twisty chills in literature which endures to this day.