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  The Victim

  Perceval Gibbon

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  Perceval Gibbon (1879-1926) was an author and journalist working on the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa and several other publications. He is best remembered for his masterly short stories, which were often characterized by an ironic twist at the end.The Victim tells the tale of César Savinien, a French poet who finds himself enjoying a terrifying streak of good fortune. Everything he does turns out brilliantly...but he believes that luck is like a pendulum and that the further it swings in one direction, the further in the opposite direction it will swing when his luck turns....This is the tale of Savinien's good fortune...and what happens when the pendulum suddenly swings the other way.

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  The Rats in the Walls

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  The story is narrated by the scion of the Delapore family, who has moved from Massachusetts to his ancestral estate in England, known as Exham Priory. On several occasions, the protagonist and his cats hear the sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further, he finds that his family maintained an underground city for centuries and that the inhabitants of the city fed on human flesh, even going so far as to raise generations of human cattle, who eventually began to de-evolve due to their sub-human living conditions. 
    
   "The Rats in the Walls" was written in September 1923 and first published in Weird Tales, in March 1924.

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  Major Namby

  Wilkie Collins

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  A brilliant and humorous short story by Wilkie Collins, in which an elderly lady, whose Victorian sensibilities on morals and propriety are finely honed, finds herself living next door to Major Namby, the ultimate neighbour from hell.

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  The Idiot

  Arnold Bennett

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  When William Froyle, ostler at the Queen's Arms at Moorthorne, learns that his betrothed has betrayed him, he determines to hang himself in the inn's coach house. 
  
  
  His first, unsuccessful attempt, is witnessed by Daft Jimmy, the village idiot. Daft Jimmy offers to help with the process of fixing the noose and takes a great deal of interest and delight in the proceedings. 
  
  
  As events unfold, it becomes less clear who is the fool and who is the wise man.

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  Between Rounds

  O. Henry

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  O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), an American writer of outstanding short stories, known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings. "Between Rounds" is the tale of a lost child, the six-year old son of the owner of a boarding house with a colourful and ecclectic range of boarders. For the brief period of the child's absence the inhabitants pause in their regular activities and relationships. The interlude is described in a warm and gently humorous manner.

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  The Best of Saki Volume 1

  Saki Saki

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  The delicious, biting wit of Saki's short stories satirizing Edwardian high society are some of the funniest and delightful of exquisite literary miniatures. In this first volume there are 22 glittering examples.Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Monro. He was born in Burma in 1870 where his father was a senior official in the Burma Police. From the age of two he lived with two maiden aunts and his grandmother in Devon and was educated in Exmouth and at the Bedford Grammar School. Later he travelled in Europe with his father. He joined the Burma police but resigned after a year because of ill health and returned to England where he began his writing career as a journalist and short story writer for magazines and newspapers. Saki is regarded as a master of the short story.At the start of the First World War he refused a commission, enlisted as a private, and went to France where, in November 1916, he was killed by a shot to the head, his last words being “Put that bloody cigarette out.”Public Domain (P)2016 Spiders' House Audio/Roy Macready

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