D J Taylor at Literary Review:
In some ways all you really need to know about Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) can be gleaned from the short story ‘Sredni Vashtar’, first published in the Westminster Gazette in the summer of 1910. Conradin – Munro’s heroes nearly always have these hifalutin names – is a sickly small boy quartered on a tyrannical guardian called Mrs de Ropp. Denied much in the way of freedom or material comfort, in particular the hot buttered toast he craves, Conradin makes a fetish out of a savage polecat-ferret hidden in the garden shed, worships it as a god and looks to it for vengeance.
But Argus-eyed Mrs de Ropp notes the garden visits and, suspecting a nest of guinea pigs, resolves to root them out. As she sets off on her mission, Conradin chants the hymn of his imperilled idol (‘His enemies called for peace but he brought them death’). When the servants come back from investigating Mrs de Ropp’s disappearance and her bloody demise, it is to find Conradin buttering toast ‘with much butter’. Somehow it’s the mention of the butter that sets this amalgam of the domestic and the horrible aflame, as if one or two of the characters in A A Milne had suddenly run amok with a crate of Kalashnikovs.
more here.
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