The Shaggy Dog & Other Stories

Here is John Pascal once again, with a new book of entertaining fiction?a collection of sixteen ?Shaggy Dog? stories and four more traditional tales, one a novelette. Saki (H.H. Munro) and O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) wrote short stories with surprise endings, but mainly satirical, not comedic. As Pascal tells us in his Preface to them: ?All Shaggy Dog tales are comedies, high or low, depending upon their subject matter and the writer?s art. Briefly, getting to the conclusion of a good Shaggy Dog story can be well worth the wait; and in a truly great one there can be a lot of fun along the way.? And he would agree that since traditionally these anecdotes have been related orally (at a Club, bar, or other private or limited venues), they have not been given the attention they deserve nor the entertainment they would provide to a larger audience.