We read this at school and it has stayed with me ever since. My own favourite story in the collection is Lamb to the Slaughter. Nothing horrific but sad and a little frightening nonetheless. Two years on she meets an old flame but his mean actions and her sense that she is betraying her husband lead her to drastic action. Anna is widowed at the beginning of the story and only slowly recovers from her husband’s death.
The Last Act from the Switch Bitch collection is a great example of simple human nastiness. Not all of the stories have a horror element but it’s hard to think of any without at least a touch of cruelty and bad behaviour. The horror is all in our own heads, the scariest kind of horror there is. The horror in Dahl’s work comes not from the content but from where our own minds take the stories after he has finished them. Nothing is explicitly spelled out but we know what is happening. A widow discovers that her fastidious and controlling husband has agreed to take part in a medical experiment which sees his brain continue to function after his death…. Everything seems perfect until he discovers her fondness for taxidermy and realises that his tea tastes funny….įollowing quickly on the heels of The Landlady is William and Mary. A sweet old lady offers him cheap lodgings in her boarding house. A young man is starting a new job in a new city and is looking for a place to stay. The Landlady is the first story in this omnibus and comes from the Kiss Kiss collection. Not every story is horrific or macabre but there is a unifying theme of human capacity for cruelty. With 48 stories from 6 different collections this is a chunky omnibus and I find it easier to pick it up and read a couple of stories at a time rather than go through it in a purely linear fashion. The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl is a great collection of macabre and frightening stories which everyone should dip into now and again. True, but one of the most terrifying things in life is the thought of what humans can do to one another rather than tales of ghosties and ghoulies. This is horror week, what is a classic children’s writer like Roald Dahl doing here? The BFG wasn’t that scary…. Short stories which expose the horror of human nature The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl.Note: If you want to own the most complete collection of all of Dahl’s short stories, you need to get The Complete Short Stories: Volume One and Volume Two.Posts in this series: Hallowe'en Horror Week Please send through any questions, comments, and corrections. You can also see a timeline of these stories arranged chronologically. They are listed alphabetically and link to pages of information. This is a list of all the short stories that Roald Dahl wrote.
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