The Fantastic Words and Worlds of Mr. Dahl...

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) has been on my mind of late. Of course, I was reminded of him when the ‘yellow press’ recently discussed the writer’s ‘problematic’ attitudes and his censure following his ‘critical re-evaluation’ bizarrely by his own family and executors of his estate... But I turned that negative into a positive; it was a welcome prompt because it reminded me of a writer I had long neglected.

Born in Llandaff, Wales, to Norwegian parents, Roald Dahl is still one of Britain's truly great modern writers. There are few, if any, who have not at least heard of his children’s stories and their cinematic adaptations. But it is not Matilda, Danny the Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that I am concerned with here. Though I do hasten to add, that I wholeheartedly recommend this aspect of his prodigious literary output. For those of you who are, like me a parent or grandparent (I claim both of those honorifics), then you will already, no doubt, know that the unexpurgated children’s tales of Dahl are a delight to both children and the fortunate adults whose happy lot it is to read the bedtime story.

But Roald Dahl was a masterful writer in other genres besides juvenile fiction, and his extensive catalogue of adult fiction contains some of the best ‘strange’ tales written in the English language in the latter half of the twentieth century. That’s a big claim, but one, nevertheless, that I make without any hesitation. It is demonstrable simply by selecting and reading from his considerable bibliography.

Before I first read his children’s stories to my own children, indeed, before I had any children at all, I was an avid juvenile viewer of Roald Dahl’s television series Tales of the Unexpected which was aired in the UK between 1979 and 1988 and filmed by Anglia Television for Independent Television (ITV). I remember that the programme’s famous intro itself was a topic of much discussion amongst my youthful peers.

The first series was based entirely on Dahl’s stories and featured the running trope of, as the series title suggests, ‘surprise’ endings. By and large, the stories contain no supernatural, science-fiction, or fantasy elements except for three of the offerings. But these three are outstanding nevertheless. William and Mary, Royal Jelly, and The Sound Machine are, I would argue, along with the delightfully macabre tale The Landlady, of the highest order of weird fiction.

Like Ray Bradbury’s weekly cameo in The Ray Bradbury Theatre, the tv series Tales of the Unexpected was initially opened with an introduction by Dahl himself. Then, the story would follow in the form of a twenty-five-minute theatrical episode. The casting was usually superlative and, the dramatic production was more than professionally easy on the eye. As with other historical British television series that I have discussed on The Obelisk (see Creeping Horror on the Box), Tales of the Unexpected is up there in the first order in ‘weird’, dramatic television productions.

With the recent revival of Dahl in my mind, I bought two of his books now eager to revisit his work.

And a return to Dahl never disappoints...                                                       

The first was a hardcover collection of classic tales of the supernatural selected for the volume by Dahl after hours of reading research. Although not a collection of his own work, it is a solid indicator of the man’s commitment to, and taste for, the genre of supernatural fiction. The collection contains a fine potpourri of fourteen devilishly good tales of terror, including F. Marion Crawford’s The Upper Berth, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Ghost of a Hand, and Cynthia Asquith’s The Corner Shop. The volume is prefaced with an introduction by Dahl himself. In this introduction, he remarks on his research into the selection:

“After a tremendous amount of scuttling around, including several visits to the British Museum Library, I managed to collect just about every ghost story that had ever been written. My house was filled with books and piles of old magazines, both bought and borrowed. Then I began to read…”

The second book cost me a mere 98 pence (about a dollar and a quarter) and is a 1979 paperback edition of Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. It’s an anthology of his short stories and contains 16 in total, including classics such as William and Mary, Royal Jelly, and The Landlady.

I won’t provide any spoilers, but each of the stories is guaranteed to supply that chilling frisson that one feels at a satisfactory denouement however unexpectedly (or unpleasantly) they may ultimately arrive... And at just over two or three hours of reading time for 98 pence, the investment feels like a real bargain.

And there is more… so much more. As stated, Dahl was prodigious. Other collections are out there for the discerning reader of the strange. My personal favourite short story not included in the above volume was a tale called The Sound Machine.

It recounts the experiments of a man named Klausner who has invented a machine that will allow him to tune in to those frequencies far beyond human hearing and convert those pitches into audible sound.

Klausner sighed and clasped his hands tightly together. “I believe,” he said, speaking more slowly now, “that there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It is possible that up there in those high-pitched, inaudible regions there is a new, exciting music being made, with subtle harmonies and fierce grinding discords, a music so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it. There may be anything . . .

And what he hears…

But, no… I’ll leave that for you to discover for yourself, dear reader.

If you have never wandered far from the ‘Chocolate Factory’ before, then take a wee gamble on Dahl’s rather ‘strange’ short stories, you’ll find they are indeed a pleasure-trove of laughter, rapt engagement, and chills. Dahl is a writer whose immortality is ensured by his eminent skill in wordsmithery and his ever-present and often dark wit. This is an author who cuts out the flimflam, creates convincing characters, and whose strange, and often macabre endings, will, I assure you, remain like an unexorcised, stubborn ghost, forever haunting the story attics of your mind.