EnCrypted: The Classic Horror Podcast

  Herbert Hugh Munro's mother was killed by a cow. Not as uncommon a demise as you might think (currently deaths-by-cow average around four a year), but surely an unusual and ironical one. It's possible that Munro a.k.a. Saki's penchant for writing cynical, cutting, occasionally macabre short stories stemmed from this early tragedy (and Sredni Vashtar is by no means the only story of his to pit the brutality of nature against civilised, effete humanity; one even includes a bull attack). But, almost certainly, an austere childhood - domineered, as he was, by a pair of overbearing maiden aunt guardians - manifests itself in his work. In Sredni Vashtar , one of Saki's most famous stories, young Conradin (liked an unusual and evocative name, did Saki) is, like the author, coddled and constricted by a puritanical aunt (Mrs de Ropp) who doesn't really like him. Poorly from an unspecified illness, and predicted an untimely death, Conradin's escape is through his imag...

Gabriel-Ernest is a delicious little tale by Hector Hugh Munro, the author more commonly known as Saki. Written in 1909, actually not too long before Saki's demise, like much of his ouevre the story is an acute satire of Edwardian society as much as a work of horror fiction, although it has been regularly anthologised as the latter ever since it was first published. The story concerns an amateur naturalist (or rather a slightly pompous hobbyist), Van Cheele, who encounters a strange and shockingly naked teenage boy when on a woodland stroll.  The beastly nature of the boy, once revealed, is unlikely to shock the modern listener; I'm not sure that was Saki's intention anyway. Instead, the blackly comic joy of 'Gabriel-Ernest' is that the horrific events are played as farce and, while the story's denouement is suitably grim, Saki is also subtly savage in the skewering of his characters' pretensions. For more on Saki, try this article by Christopher Hitchens ....