Showing 1-4 out of 4 reviews.

• Just like Kiss Kiss, a must read. Full to the brim of wonderful, plot-hatching short stories. All of his stories are for children. Either written for children, or written for adults who need the child to come out of them. Typical Dahl build-up : “At exactly that moment, his eyes and mouth began slowly to open, in a sort of wonder, and slowly he raised his head and became still, absolutely motionless, gazing at the wall opposite with this look that was more perhaps of astonishment than of wonder, but quite fixed now, unmoving, and remaining thus for forty, fifty, sixty seconds.”

  5.00 out of 5

  stipe168

• If one were to sum up Dahl's short stories in a single word, that word would be cruelty. Unalloyed viciousness is the medium through which Dahl crafts his tales, unmixed with hope or kindness. They are, as such a description may suggest, best consumed in small doses. One cannot dwell for too long in the rarefied world in which man practices upon his fellow man constantly.But each story (barring the last few, a loosely linked set of rather clumsy stories that don't live up to the earlier stories and don't really belong in the collection) is as perfectly crafted as a Venetian stiletto. Dahl is a practiced master of the whip-crack ending, but his real skill as a virtuoso is revealed in his depictions of people suffering from trauma. Indeed, he anticipates modern trauma theory and brings to life neurological disorder in stories like "The Soldier," vividly depicting the horrors of such disorders, the flashing faces, unexplained footsteps, the nerves that don't feel.The relations of lovers come in for special digs here as elsewhere in Dahl's work, with partners committing all manner of psychic and physical violence upon one another. The result is as likely to be comedy as horror, and the suspension between the two is what propels the stories forward. In Dahl's world, if the meek inherited the earth, they would promptly rain ingenious terror on their former oppressors while the reader watched, caught in a deliciously uneasy space between horror and delight.

  4.00 out of 5

  jemsw

• I will never forget that rose.

  3.00 out of 5

  thesmellofbooks

• This book made me appreciate reading short stories again. Roald Dahl's dark, bizarre and sometimes grotesque stories are brilliantly written.

  2.50 out of 5

  izzynomad

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