Review 3: Collected Short Stories, Roald Dahl

16/01/07 23:23 Filed in: Books
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Before I even begin, let it be known: I am a rabid Dahl fan. I read nearly all of his kids books over and over as a child, however, it was with some trepidation that I started into his adult fiction. I wasn't sure if the same guy who wrote naughty children's books would be the same for an adult audience. I started reading this book about a year ago, slowly working through the stories, starting with the shortest ones as I would often be reading before bed.

I'll just go ahead and say that they are delicious, electric and disturbing. His stories largely fall into a few well defined camps: stories set in WWII (in which he was an RAF pilot), stories about assholes we end up liking anyway, stories that start out ordinary and end very very sinister, stories of science gone awry, and stories with a great, often funny, twist. Actually, the majority of them have twists, but the last category is for ones that aren't WWII, assholesque, sinister or scientific.

I ended up liking the stories about antiheroes, tricksters, scammers and infamous womanizers the most. For at least a quarter of his 50-odd stories I palpably quivered with tension as I tried to read without skipping ahead, having to go back paragraphs again and again as my excitement grew. A couple others shocked me so badly that I couldn't stop thinking about them, and I couldn't decide whether I thought "oh, that poor bastard. That sucks so much." Or, "That is hilarious. He totally had that coming." Really, both were true, and it is rare that a writer can create such tension not only within the story but within a reader's emotional response. A couple stories were duds, but this was largely because I felt that the twist was just too cruel to the protagonist or came too early to be a shock. These, however, where huge exceptions. The vast majority bred sympathy and lulled my senses so easily that each story still had an effect upon me.

 Matt, another fan, said he read Dahl's stories a little at a time because the endless twists can become repetitive. I don't quite agree, but I do think that the book should be read a little at a time to better savour the stories, and that a reader should skip around instead of reading all of his war stories or sexy ones all at once (and they do sort of form clumps in the books that make up the collected). Before reading the last story (the last one in order as well) I reread one previous to it that I thought I hadn't. Even though I knew the result, I still really enjoyed watching Dahl craft the buildup to that moment, so for me at least, these twist stories bore rereading.

If you want to get a taste of his writing, find a copy of this book and sit down with one of the following great examples of the 5 different subgroups mentioned above:
Parson's Pleasure
Beware of the Dog or They Shall Not Grow Old
The Butler
Genesis and Catastrophe
The Great Automatic Grammatizator

Now that I have this list, I urge, nay, order you to go out and read these!
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