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Of the many short stories by Saki, I found Sredni Vashtar to be one of the darkest. While many of his stories are morbid, Sredni Vashtar has a young boy praying for the death of his guardian to something he imagines to be a god. Sredni Vashtar and The Lord of the Flies are tales which honestly talk about the darkness in children.
The Lord of the Flies was motivated as a counterpoint to another work. What inspired Sredni Vashtar?
It seems that Sredni Vashtar, like many of Saki's stories pitting children against adults, was inspired from his childhood. Saki had lost his parents at an early age, and was fostered by tyrannical aunts. From Reading Saki: The Fiction of H.H. Munro by Brian Gibson:
Munro's true mother was run over by a cow and Ethel notes that Aunt Augusta was afraid of the creatures, [...] this bovine-induced tragedy seems significant, given Saki's "preoccupation with animals that attack women"; these attacks seem both imaginative recreations and reworkings of Mary Munro's death — perhaps helping her son to deal vicariously with the loss — and fantasies of surrogate-mothers' deaths. Ethel Munro herself notes that Aunt Augusta and Aunt Tom were "guilty of mental cruelty; we often longed for revenge".
Saki's stories, perhaps reflecting Munro's absence of or yearning for his mother, do not show the defeat of a mother as often as they revel in the defeat of aunts or other female guardian figures by fate, animals and children. [...] In the much-anthologized "Sredni Vashtar", Conradin's revered polecat-ferret kills his strict cousin-guardian Mrs. De Ropp after she kills Conradin's pet Houdan hen, echoing Munro's childhood loss of a favourite Houdan cock.
(Ethel Munro is Saki's sister.)
And later on, while discussing The Lumber-Room, The Penance and Sredni Vashtar:
This sense of surveillance, of being trapped by a guardian's watchful eye, more in keeping with Victorian than Edwardian settings for child-centered fiction, suggests these tales tap into the adult Munro's remembrance of his 1870s childhood.
Firstly thanks for a question about Saki, one of my favourite authors sadly forgotten between Wilde and Wodehouse.
I think this is a matter of interpretation; I have read all of Saki's short stories multiple times, and I don't find Sredni Vashtar to be one of the darkest, or even dark at all. I think it's just a combination of two things:
Many of Saki's stories have a humorous opposition between a child (or young person) and an aunt or similar guardian. (Seen in Wilde and Wodehouse too.) The most satisfying example is in The Lumber Room, where Nicholas outwits his cousins' aunt (inimitably described by Saki as "the aunt-by-assertion" and "the soi-disant aunt"). But of course similar examples are scattered throughout the stories.
Many of Saki's stories use death humorously: in Esmé we have a boy being eaten by a hyena (feels morbid typing it here, but the story is hilarious); we have the same being discussed at great length by Clovis in The Quest; in Laura we have her joking about her death and then dying (sandwiched between two delicious sentences), The Unrest Cure is a joke about genocide written when it must have been absurd, and so on. (And minor examples abound, such as the death at the end of Tobermory.)
So, if you don't take the death of Conradin's guardian seriously, Sredni Vashtar is a typical Saki story: there's an imaginative boy (or sometimes it's a girl, as in the stories featuring Vera, most famously The Open Window); he's clever but the adults are rigid and oppressive; he has a world of his own (greatly amplified by his imagination) in which the adults have no admittance and would not understand anyway; and just once, he gets his satisfaction. What's not to like? :-)
I would not compare it to The Lord of the Flies, which I found truly dark and frankly will probably not read again. On the other hand, each time I dip into Saki it's pure joy and (somewhat horrified) laughter, and I don't think we need to consider stories like Sredni Vastar as being about the darkness in children. Saki's children are independent and consider themselves superior to the adults; any harm wished on the obtuse adults is purely secondary and comes from indifference or a wish to break free, rather than malice.
TL;DR: The fact that Sredni Vastar fits into a general pattern of Saki stories and characters means that we need not look for any special inspiration for it specifically.
