"Laura" (1914)

This very short Saki story is not scary, but more like a joke, and no, I'm not referring to the fact that it could well hold the record for fewest characters in an author and title combined (rivaling Keith's "98.6" in pop music). Saki's theme was more human malice, with only little strokes of the uncanny. He stood somewhat to the side of horror. He loved ridiculous situations and this story is that and only gets more so. Once again, brevity saves all. It's practically done before you groan once. It starts with Laura telling her friend Amanda that her doctor says she (Laura) has until Tuesday to live. It is Saturday. It comes across like a tea party game we don't understand but then it seems to be the truth. In Laura's belief system, she says, she hasn't been the best person, and thus she will be reincarnated as a lower creature. She imagines an otter. Then she spins it out further: "If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think." (A moment now for the benighted, so many of them in all human history, who never understood the tragedy of racism and colonialism. We're done with the worst of it in this story, and yes, I'm disappointed in Saki too. As an anti-bully, though admittedly with mixed loyalties, you would think he'd know better.) Amanda's husband Egbert comes up in this conversation too. Laura can't stand him and has never been able to. It's one of the sins she's taking to the grave with her. She has often tormented Egbert in irksome passive-aggressive ways, for example harassing his prize hens with her dogs. She knew these things were wrong and did them anyway. That's why her reincarnation points down. Laura dies on Monday. Even before the funeral—in a way I like the willful high-handed ridiculous misconstruing of reincarnation, never close to uncanny but making the story more funny—something very much like an otter is getting into Egbert's hens. You see everything coming but it's so briskly executed you almost don't, partly because it is all at once so impossible and so, well, cheap. The animus of Laura toward Egbert grows more funny with every single iteration. It's senseless, like a sitcom device, like Seinfeld and Newman, but carried off on pure instinct.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.

"The Lumber Room" (1914)

Saki was always so good at using children to set sinister tones in scenes that are really not sinister at all. "The Lumber Room" takes no turns toward violence, let alone the supernatural, yet it seethes with a malevolence that feels almost toxic. Nicholas is staying with his cousins and their aunt. He refuses to acknowledge her as his aunt. She is strict and can be punitive when challenged. On the morning of the story Nicholas claims he can't eat his breakfast because there is a frog in it. The aunt tells him there could not possibly be a frog in his "bread-and-milk." Nicholas describes it in detail and the aunt denies it more. But there is a frog because Nicholas put it there. He has exposed another lazy lying adult. The aunt, angry for his prank, grounds him for the day, barring him a jaunt to the beach with the other children. In addition, he is forbidden to go into the gooseberry garden, which the aunt evidently believes would be the main attraction for a boy confined at home for the day. But it is actually the lumber room that appeals to him, where old furniture, unwanted gifts, and other miscellaneous junk are kept out of sight. The aunt spends the day puttering about the place, ignoring Nicholas as further punishment. After a while she notices she doesn't know where he is, searches for him, and ends up in a predicament in which the tables are turned and she needs his help. It's more a matter of inconvenience than danger, but it's also not entirely clear, which makes the moment when Nicholas must decide what to do unusually fraught with tension. Then he makes his decision—to do the wrong thing. In these scant few paragraphs the tension is high. It's all of youth in conflict with all of age and the vulnerable pathos of Nicholas is remarkable. It's a daring and outrageous act in the moment, much like the lie the little girl will tell in "The Open Window." This tension and pathos is what Saki is good at. Nicholas is at once a typical annoying misbehaving boy and a kind of heroic figure, willfully mistreated by an adult who is supposed to know better. This adult, the aunt, is the one who gets the comeuppance in this story and she's the one who most deserves it, so it's as satisfying as it is entertaining.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Boarding House" (1914)

Read story by James Joyce online.

I'm often surprised when I read James Joyce by how good he is. I should know better, but there it is. This story is a good example. It's a simple story, though shaded many subtle directions, about a marginally illicit affair between a man in his 30s staying at a boardinghouse and the 19-year-old daughter of the boardinghouse's mistress. It's truly short, under 10 printed pages, but packed with information. The backstory of Mrs. Mooney, for example, the boardinghouse mistress in question, is sketched out quickly and with useful detail. She's had a hard life and is not an easy woman. Daughter of a butcher, she married a butcher, who went bad after a while—drinking, mainly, and laziness. Mrs. Mooney got out of that marriage and opened a boardinghouse. Her attitude is evident in the cold way she calculates her prospects after she learns the boarder, a Mr. Doran, has been fooling around with her girl, Polly. This is all in Dublin, of course, coming from Joyce's collection of stories, Dubliners. Mrs. Mooney learns of the affair but does nothing at first. Polly knows she's watching but carries on anyway. "[Mrs. Mooney] dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat," Joyce writes. "She was sure she would win.... She felt sure she would win." The story is told in the third-person by an omniscient narrator. He not only knows everything, but he also know what are the most telling details, as his discussion of Mrs. Mooney's butchering background, or the violence of her older son. But mostly he spends time inside the head of Mrs. Mooney, sometimes Polly. Toward the end, he focuses on Mr. Doran, who is not exactly averse to marrying Polly—he knows he has sinned, he feels the guilt keenly—but his memories confirm to him that he has been manipulated by Polly into the position. It's just slightly comical, the whole thing, and not without its pathos. We understand better than Mr. Doran how he actually has been tricked. The outlook is not especially good for a happy marriage in the long term, but of such stuff are many marriages made. Thus, though it is close to appalling in many ways, it ultimately bends closer to comic than tragic. Another hapless bourgeoisie falls into the clutches of the grasping working class. What I like best about the story is how complete it is unto itself. It tells us everything we need to know about how this situation transpired, with no judgments whatsoever of anyone's motivation or character. It's an anecdote, really—a story might tell us a little more about how it turned out—and a funny one, sharply realized.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Dubliners by James Joyce