Beasts and Super Beasts

Beasts And Super-Beasts In An Eternal Struggle Against Human Hypocrisy

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, is widely regarded as one of the great masters of the short story. He has written countless stories generally dealing with human hypocrisy and nature’s struggle against it. Many of his greatest stories are compiled into his collection Beasts and Super-Beasts.

The author named the collection Beasts and Super-Beasts – apparently a parody to George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. In it, his mostly parodies the “high” Edwardian society and its whims. Most of his short stories are about nature’s struggle against man’s greed and hypocrisy, with the nature generally winning. He is most likely to have been influenced as a child while growing up in British Burma.

Most of his stories have animals as the heroes. In these, the fierce struggle of nature is usually emphasized, with humans usually losing against it. An example story tells about a forest in the Eastern Carpathians where two families feud over it. Apparently, one family owns the forest, while the other hunts there regardless. One night, a leader of the owning family catches the other hunting without permission. However, he can’t shoot without warning, and both of them abstain. The coincidence makes it that a tree branch falls and traps them both underneath it. They try to escape it but can’t, and in their struggle they realize that they have been quarreling for nothing. They become friends and make peace. They then start calling for their men for assistance and then they distinguish nine or ten silhouettes in a hill. The story ends with them realizing that those silhouettes are actually wolves.

Beasts and Super-Beasts is a highly regarded collection of short stories that will delight, horrify as well as amuse readers with its witty and perhaps macabre style of satirizing human society.