"More classic horror narrations on Jonathan's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JonathanDunneHorrorAudiobooks
Title: Sredni Vashtar
Author: Saki (H. H. Munro)
Narrator: Jonathan Dunne
Original Publication: 1912
Public Domain: Yes
Series Placement: Timeless Terrors No. 79
Description:
Sredni Vashtar is one of Saki’s most unsettling and darkly ironic tales — a precise exploration of repression, power, and private vengeance. The story follows Conradin, a frail boy living under the rigid control of his guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, whose cold authority dominates his life. Deprived of affection and freedom, Conradin retreats into a secret world of imagination and ritual.
Central to this world is the shed at the bottom of the garden, where he keeps a ferret he worships as a personal god, Sredni Vashtar. Through quiet devotion and imagined rites, Conradin gives this creature the power denied to him, and the story unfolds with a calm inevitability toward a chilling climax.
Saki’s restrained prose makes the horror subtle yet potent, arising not from spectacle but from moral indifference and the consequences of cruelty. Narrated by Amazon-bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures the story’s tension, irony, and quiet menace.
Sredni Vashtar remains a timeless reminder that even the smallest, most silenced lives can harbor forces capable of unsettling and irrevocable change."
"First published in 1912, The Unbearable Bassington stands as Saki’s most substantial venture into longer fiction, and perhaps his most poignant. Known primarily for his razor-edged short stories—where wit, mischief, and a certain cool cruelty dance in quick succession—Saki (H. H. Munro) brings those same gifts to this novel, but with a deeper, darker resonance.
At the centre of the story is Comus Bassington: charming, feckless, brilliant, and disastrously ill-suited to the demands of the polite Edwardian world that surrounds him. His mother, the formidable Francesca, hopes to guide him toward a respectable life, but her ambitions collide with his temperament at every turn. What begins as social comedy gradually shades into tragedy, revealing Saki’s acute understanding of human frailty—and his sense that society’s expectations can crush as easily as they refine."
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