Roald Dahl – The Complete Short Stories

(Volume One, 1944-1953; Volume Two, 1954-1988)

Roald Dahl (1916 – 1990) Welsh born, Norwegian descent, started his writing life by accident. Invalidated out of WWII from the RAF, he was asked by C.S. Forester in Washington to prepare some accounts to publicise the war effort. His robust but sometimes surreal war stories ensued; he then enlarged his métier with droll and often shocking tales of the weird and unexpected.

He was no great stylist: his sentences at times stray into the excesses reminiscent of Hemingway, but the ingeniousness of his little plots and the dark corners of life he illuminates are quite wonderful. Yes, some of the stories are grotesque, even at times revolting, but at their best, they crackle and repay attention.

TVC especially liked his war story, Beware of the Dog; the rollicking Rabelais-like Madame Rosette; the risky bets placed in Man From the South and Taste; the full phytomorphic horror of The Sound Machine (do plants feel pain?); the Buffalo-Bill terror of Skin; greed foiled in The Mildenhall Treasure; the cooking-plot of Lamb to the Slaughter; and the prescient Great Automatic Grammatizator (published 1953) in which Dahl not only predicted Artificial intelligence but its fallout.

Volume Two highlights include Parson’s Pleasure, Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat, The Bookseller, and The Butler (greed again foiled); The Landlady; the Twilight-zone-worthy William and Mary; squalid erotica in The Visitor, Bitch and The Great Switcheroo; and clever but petty crime in The Umbrella Man and The Hitch-Hiker.

As Anthony Horowitz writes in the introduction to Vol. 2 (Charlie Higson introduced Vol. 1), “Sly, shocking, disturbing, mischievous or downright malevolent, Dahl caters to every taste.”