Born in Llandaff, Wales, of well-to-do Norwegian parents, educated in England, and a pilot with the Royal Air Force for part of the Second World War, Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is the author of numerous books for children[1] and a relatively small but distinct body of prose fiction for adults: Over to You (1946), Someone Like You (1953), Kiss Kiss (1960), Selected Stories (1970), Switch Bitch (1974), and Eight Short Stories (1987). The Collected Stories, with an excellent introduction by Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown, is a gathering of forty-eight stories of considerable diversity, ambition, and quality, with settings ranging from Kenya to rural England, London, and New York City and narrative styles ranging from the realistic to the fabulist and surreal.

Though a number of Dahl's most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, his reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongest, like artful variants of Grimm's fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled "My Lady Love, My Dove": "I'm a nasty person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That's why we get along together." Given Dahl's predilection for severely punishing his fictional characters, you might expect this nasty lady to be punished, but Roald Dahl is not a writer to satisfy expectations.

Though in his fiction for adults as in his books for children Dahl exhibits the flair of a natural storyteller, for whom no bizarre leap of the imagination is unlikely, he seems to have begun writing, at the urging of C.S. Forester, as a consequence of his wartime experiences in the RAF, which included crash-landing in the African desert and participating in highly dangerous air battles during the German invasion of Greece. Such early stories as "An African Story," "Only This," "Someone Like You," and "Death of an Old Old Man" draw memorably on these experiences and suggest that if Dahl had not concentrated on the short-story form and more or less abandoned realism for the showy detonations of plot made popular in his youth by Saki and O. Henry, he might have developed into a very different sort of writer altogether.

Since Klausner is "a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted," we are not surprised when the sound machine picks up the "frightful, throatless shrieks" of roses being cut in the garden next door, and the terrible shriek of a tree into which an ax has been driven: "enormous and frightful and...it had made him feel sick with horror." Klausner too is led away: the inevitable fate for a person who hasn't inured himself to the horrors of even ordinary life, like "normal" people.

In the aptly titled "Poison," one of Dahl's most brilliantly realized stories, an Englishman living in Bengal, India, is held thrall in his bed by what he believes to be a krait (a highly poisonous snake common to the region) coiled and sleeping on his stomach, beneath a sheet. The terrified man, unable to move for fear of waking the snake, is aided by a fellow Englishman, the narrator of the story, and by a local Indian doctor who behaves heroically only to be viciously insulted when the ordeal is over by the racist Englishman he'd helped: "You dirty little Hindu sewer rat!" This story, for most of its length an excruciating tale of suspense, exudes the air of a fable even as it must have made for painful reading at the time of its first publication, in the popular American magazine Collier's.

In a mordantly funny coda that must have stirred visceral dread in male, upper-middle-class New Yorker readers of that pre-feminist era, the elderly liberated woman, returning from her highly enjoyable trip, is pleased to discover when she reenters the townhouse a "faint and curious odour in the air that she had never smelled before."

Mary's revenge too is one of comic-book simplicity: she will take her husband's brain away with her, and blow smoke rings into the permanently opened eye: "I just can't wait to get him home."

In this crude misogynist fable, which Jeremy Treglown in his introduction concedes that Dahl "would have done better to have scrapped," the vengeful Conrad so humiliates Anna sexually that the poor woman is driven to commit suicide.

Recoiling from his childhood experience with a cartoon monster-mother, George conducts improbable experiments with white rats, determining that the female of the rat species is more sexually rapacious than the male, even when death by electrocution is involved; it's no surprise that he falls prey to a female parishioner with the ominous name Roach whose face is covered with a "pale carpet of fuzz" and whose enormous mouth, threatening a kiss, is "huge and wet and cavernous." Soon, in a parody-paroxysm of female sexual desire, Miss Roach begins to "grunt and snort like a hog"; crying, "Don't! Don't, Mummy!," George finds himself sucked into the woman's mouth where, after a ludicrous struggle reminiscent of certain of the mock-heroic adventures of Swift's Lemuel Gulliver among the giant Brobdingnagians, the virginal bachelor is swallowed: "I could feel the slow powerful pulsing of peristalsis dragging away at my ankles, pulling me down and down and down...."

Dahl's punished figures are not exclusively sexual victims: in "Taste," a nouveau riche wine connoisseur is insulted at his own dinner table by a "famous gourmet." In "Pig," as in a cautionary Grimm's fairy tale for greedy children, a young man who cares too much for food is led off to be butchered with other pigs strung up by their ankles: "...taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, [the slaughterer] raised his right hand and deftly slit open the boy's jugular vein with a knife."

[1] Among Roald Dahl's most popular children's books are James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), The BFG ("Big Friendly Giant") (1982), and Matilda (1988); of particular interest to adult readers of Roald Dahl are Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977), which contains the autobiographical essay "Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer." In his memoirist pieces for young readers, Dahl speaks with an engaging directness and honesty which suggests that his most comfortable mode of writing was in fact for young readers whose natural curiosity, lack of cynicism, and inexperience he could assume. Dahl's success as a writer of children's books far surpassed his success as a writer of prose fiction for adults and, according to Jeremy Treglown, "part of [Dahl] always resented that he had become best known as the author of what are known in American publishing as 'juveniles.'"

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