Beasts and Super-Beasts

About the book

Saki's stories turn visits, meals, family arrangements, and fashionable conversation into opportunities for sudden disruption. In The Open Window, a visitor's readiness to believe makes storytelling unusually effective; elsewhere, Clovis and other socially alert figures exploit the distance between a person's confidence and their actual understanding. Animals may enter as physical presences or as the centre of an inventive claim, unsettling the human conviction that the room is under control. The prose is compact, with an apparently incidental phrase often preparing the later reversal. Beneath the elegant manner lies a sharp appetite for exposing vanity, interference, and the complacency of respectable adults. The collection rewards attention to who controls the account of an event, since possession of the best story can matter more than innocence or good intentions.

• Social pretence
• Storytelling and power
• Comic disruption

Why read it

For tightly managed comic stories whose polished manners make their sudden reversals especially effective.

Short-story collection · English text