The Complete Short Stories

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Hypnotic reading. - Rated
Saki's work is addictive. Once you begin to explore his cruelly observant writing, and to savour the menace, moral or supernatural, beneath its surface no other English writer will really do.

A delightful collection of stories - Rated
Hector Hugh Munro, alias "Saki", exposes with sharp wit all the absurdities and hypocrisies found in the country houses and clubs of the upper classes in the 1910s. Some stories are witty, others macabre and acid because the author drives a knife into the upper crust of the English Edwardian society. And the characters of the self-possessed Clovis or the vain and stylish Reginald are simply unforgettable.

AN INSIDIOUS ADDICTION - Rated
The stories of H.H.Munro - better known by his pen-name of Saki - have scarcely been out of print since they were first published around a hundred years ago. Yet it often seems that their particular delights are reserved for the private pleasures of his coterie of admirers.

It has to be admitted that a taste for Saki is something of an addiction. And, like all addictions, once acquired it is hard to give up. In the years since his tragic early death in the trenches of World War I at the hands of a German sniper, fellow addicts have included Graham Greene, Noel Coward and Tom Sharpe. All of us take a slightly wicked satisfaction from his biting wit and the subversive way in which he undermines the staid Edwardian society he purports to merely observe.

But, to a much greater extent than his near-contemporaries, Wilde and Kipling, there is something dark and menacing at the heart of Saki's writing. Behind the refined tinkle of teacups on an Edwardian lawn can be heard the distant howling of a wolf. Hidden among the shrubbery in a carefully manicured garden lurk all kinds of Beasts and Superbeasts, ready to wreak Nature's revenge on an uncaring mankind with its arrogant belief in materialism, progress and the innate respectability of middle-class values. Where Kipling's Jungle Book menagerie tends to simple analogies of human types, Saki's animals can rise up with the full power of Pan himself.

This is not to ignore Saki's ability to turn an aphorism with all the facility and wit of the divine Oscar at his best. Nor does it forget his ability to prick the inflated egos of louche young men with too much time and money on their hands or deliciously dotty aunts and duchesses with their minds firmly fixed on Empire and their Imperial responsibilities.

It would be easy to argue that Munro foresaw the imminent collapse of this society into the cataclysm of the Great War. With his experience as a political journalist in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, he was probably more aware than most of the storm that was about to break over Europe.

But essentially he was an observer of his fellow man. And it is for the humour of his observations, for the dazzling twists and turns his tales take and for the fact that he makes us laugh inordinately that he is to be treasured and why we addicts are prepared to share our secret vice with those who have yet to acquire the habit.

A really brilliant collection of stories - Rated
These are some of the wittiest, cleverest and (sometimes) most cruel stories you could hope to come across. Although nearly 100 years old, the characters feel fresh and original. I have read most of the stories dozens of times and enjoyed them afresh each time. Nice observations about society life during Edwardian times too. Do try them - I can't imagine anyone being disappointed!

clever and very very funny - Rated
Saki's short stories have to be some of the best around. Most of them are funny and all of them are clever, having the added attraction of not becoming boring after one read. Some of the stories in this volume are in the form of monologues, especially on the part of Reginald, a character around whom Saki's earliest volume of stories were based. Another character who had much ink lavished upon him was Clovis Sangrail, whose poem, the Durbar Recessional, is surely unforgettable to those who have read it.
Saki's short stories are as brilliant as when they were first published, even if the Edwardian society they satirized has long since vanished into the past.