Roald Dahl - Tales Of The Unexpected

[dem bones]

Roald Dahl - Tales Of The Unexpected (Penguin, 1979, 1984)

Taste
Lamb To The Slaughter
Man From The South
My Lady Love, My Dove
Dip In The Pool
Galloping Foxley
Skin
Neck
Nunc Diminittis
The Landlady
William And Mary
The Way Up To Heaven
Parson's Pleasure
Mrs. Bixby And The Colonel's Coat
Royal Jelly
Edward The Conqueror

Roald Dahl - More Tales Of The Unexpected (Penguin, 1981, 1983)

Poison
The Sound Machine
Georgy Porgy
Genesis And Catastrophe
The Hitch-Hiker
The Umbrella Man
Mr. Botibol
Vengeance Is Mine, inc.
The Butler

we had a Dahl thread on Vault Mk I but i can't find one on here. as i'm sure you're all aware, the majority of the stories have nothing to do with horror or the supernatural, but neither do the best of them scrimp on suspense and entertainment value. It's not unlikely that Stephen King wrote Quitters, Inc off the back of reading Man From The South and Vengeance Is Mine, inc..

Lamb To The Slaughter: Pregnant Mrs. Mary Maloney is so distraught when her detective husband Patrick tells her he's leaving that she whacks him over the head with the first thing that comes to hand; a leg of lamb from the freezer. Exit Patrick, enter several colleagues from the Police Station to investigate the brutal murder. Can she destroy the evidence?

Man From The South: Its a simple enough wager. Strike a lighter to flame ten times on the spin and Carlos will give you the keys to his Cadillac. Fail and he chops off your little finger with his custom built miniature guillotine. A young sailor takes up his challenge.

Vengeance Is Mine, inc.: A service for those politicians and celebrities who've just discovered their phones have been hacked by The News Of The World & Co! For a very reasonable fee, Claude and George will visit various humiliations upon Fleet Street columnists who target the rich and powerful. George is the muscle, Claude the getaway car driver and brains behind the operation. Their first mission is to land a punch on the nose of that arch smug git Lionel Pantaloon outside the Penguin Club. The twist when it arrives isn't the least "unexpected".

The Landlady: Young Billy Weaver, on business in Bath, takes a room at a Bed & Breakfast run by a sweet old girl who’s very particular about the type of client she’ll accept. The landlady, he soon decides, is dotty - why does she keep calling him ‘Mr. Weaver’? - but harmless. At least he got the first part right …

The Butler: Tibbs puts one over on his boorish millionaire employees, the Cleavers, who fancy themselves overnight wine experts.

Royal Jelly: Albert and Mabel Taylor’s new born daughter isn’t doing well. She’s lost two pounds since birth and won’t take her bottle. Albert is a beekeeper by vocation and flicking through one of the trade magazines he hits on the solution: if he were to lace baby’s milk with Royal Jelly …

The baby thrives to the point that within a few days and several hefty doses she is twice the weight of a normal tot although her body is taking on an odd shape. Funnily enough, now Mabel comes to think about it, her husband has a bee-like quality about him too …

to be continued most likely

[jamesdoig]

I'm still reading the dahl biography - quite an amazing guy, though a bit of a shit at times.

Here's the bit about the short lived ghost story TV series in the late '50s: "The aim was to create a drama series out of classic ghost stories and Roald's initial task was to choose the tales. This involved a great amount of enjoyable reading and started promisingly enough when a pilot episode was commissioned after Roald had presented his producer, Alfred Knopf's half brother Edwin, with what he considered to be the twenty-four finest stories. the tale selected for this trailblazer was "The Hanging of Arther Wadham", by E.F. Benson...."

He chose 14 of the 24 stories for this, which is a pretty ho hum anthology really, nothing out of left field:

[cw67q]

Jan 25, 2011 7:08:32 GMT jamesdoig said:

He chose 14 of the 24 stories for this, which is a pretty ho hum anthology really, nothing out of left field:

Yeah it's a real duffer of a collection, particularly given the rather superior and mean sprited tone of the introduction: Dahl tells us how he had to wade through never ending dreck in deapir of finding any worthwhile ghost stories on the verge of giving up he is bowled over by one of EF Benson's most forgetable tales.

Not my favourite anthology despite the presence of several very good entries.

- Chris

[dem bones]

we've a thread for Roald Dahl’s Book Of Ghost Stories, including jonathan's blow by blow account of the spooky tales therein. Somehow - perhaps it's due to his curmudgeonly introduction - the stories, outstanding as many of them are, don't sit well together, and the end result is as flat as a pancake. And as to all that bollocks about the centuries he spent trawling through the darkest recesses of the British Library for material ...

Meanwhile, back at Tales Of The Unexpected, it's the turn of one of his more macabre offerings, the battle of the sexes horror comedy William And Mary: As William Pearl, a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford University, lies dying of pancreatic cancer, he's approached by his colleague John Landy, the brilliant neurosurgeon. Landy informs William that he is just the man he's looking for to take part in an experiment. The gist of it is, at the moment of death, Landy wants to remove William's brain and keep it going by means of attaching various veins and arteries to an artificial heart, the whole sitting in a basin of water. Philosopher or not, initially this gruesome idea does not appeal to William in the slightest, but when Landy tells him he can also attach an eyeball to enable his reading through the centuries, William slowly comes around. He spends his remaining days compiling a letter outlining his plans and a list of do's and - mostly - don't's for his long-suffering wife Mary who is, understandably, horrified. However, a month on from the funeral, Mary visits Landy to see how things panned out and the answer is very well. Mary decides that she far prefers this new, helpless William to the rather more substantial, domineering model of old and insists on taking him home.

[The Lurker In The Shadows]

'The Man from the South' and 'The Landlady' seem to be two of the stories Jeremy Dyson has adapted for the stage in 'Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales'.
www.everymanplayhouse.com/show/ROALD_DAHLS_TWISTED_TALES/496.aspx

Sounds like a good show, though I've still not managed to get to London to see Dyson and Andy Nyman's 'Ghost Stories'. I really hope it tours some time soon.

[dem bones]

Dip In The Pool: To give himself the best chance of winning $6, 000 in the daily bet on how many miles the ship will cover in 24 hours, passenger William Botibol throws himself overboard into calm waters, safe in the knowledge that he's been spotted falling overboard and it's only a matter of time before the captain launches a lifeboat. The delay while he's being rescued should be enough to see him walk away with the cash. What could possibly go wrong (again), etc?

The more you read of this stuff, it's hard not to think of them as better-written versions of the type of stories you'd find in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Dip In The Pool is fun, but these next two merely annoyed me.

Poison: Timber Woods receives an emergency call from a panicked Harry at some ungodly hour of the night. Harry whispers that he's woken to discover a krait snuggled up on his belly. One false move and it will shoot him full of deadly venom! What is to be done?

Genesis And Catastrophe (A True Story): i'm surprised Herbert Van Thal didn't run this as one of the early Pan Horror's sporadic "thoughtful" pieces (Roman Gary's The Oldest Story Ever Told, Frederick Treeves's The Elephant Man, that awful John Keefauver one featuring Adam & Eve, etc.) Klara's previous three children have died in infancy. It's just the world's rotten luck that the fourth survives to invade Poland ...

[Jojo Lapin X]

Jan 26, 2011 9:27:45 GMT dem bones said:

Genesis And Catastrophe (A True Story): i'm surprised Herbert Van Thal didn't run this as one of the early Pan Horror's sporadic "thoughtful" pieces (Roman Gary's The Oldest Story Ever Told, Frederick Treeves's The Elephant Man, that awful John Keefauver one featuring Adam & Eve, etc.) Klara's previous three children have died in infancy. It's just the world's rotten luck that the fourth survives to invade Poland ...

I am sure there are people who think that one is a tour-de-force of some kind. But if it were a legitimate type of story, then one could easily generate similar stories concerning Joseph Stalin, Charles Manson, the 9/11 amateur pilots, or any other similarly notorious figure. It would be a genre unto itself---but I cannot imagine that anyone would want to read the stuff. This suggests to me that it is not a legitimate type of story.

[Johnlprobert]

Jan 26, 2011 10:35:47 GMT Jojo Lapin X said:

Jan 26, 2011 9:27:45 GMT dem bones said:

Genesis And Catastrophe (A True Story): i'm surprised Herbert Van Thal didn't run this as one of the early Pan Horror's sporadic "thoughtful" pieces (Roman Gary's The Oldest Story Ever Told, Frederick Treeves's The Elephant Man, that awful John Keefauver one featuring Adam & Eve, etc.) Klara's previous three children have died in infancy. It's just the world's rotten luck that the fourth survives to invade Poland ...

I am sure there are people who think that one is a tour-de-force of some kind. But if it were a legitimate type of story, then one could easily generate similar stories concerning Joseph Stalin, Charles Manson, the 9/11 amateur pilots, or any other similarly notorious figure. It would be a genre unto itself---but I cannot imagine that anyone would want to read the stuff. This suggests to me that it is not a legitimate type of story.

It's interesting that no-one's picked up on that and written stories with similar 'twist endings'. I remember the TV adaptation of this one, btw, and its punchline

[ramseycampbell]

Surely the point is that Hitler's siblings really died that young - did the likes of Stalin have similar domestic backgrounds?

[Dr Strange]

Jan 26, 2011 12:15:16 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Surely the point is that Hitler's siblings really died that young

And that he was wanted and loved by his parents... not the background you would necessarily expect for a "monster".

Charlie Manson had a pretty horrible childhood, for example - apparently "sold" by his alcoholic mother at one point.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Jan 26, 2011 12:15:16 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Surely the point is that Hitler's siblings really died that young - did the likes of Stalin have similar domestic backgrounds?

To be sure Stalin also was born, had parents, etc. My point is that the Dahl story has no point.

[dem bones]

i appreciated the first Tales Of The Unexpected well enough as a teen,, but this is the first time i've read the slimline More Tales ... (though i know of Poison and Georgy Porgy from elsewhere) and it's been .... underwhelming. i wouldn't know what does or what does not constitute a 'legitimate type of story', JoJo, but i share your disdain for Genesis And Catastrophe. i am likely doing him and his core readership a grave injustice but it came across to me as ever so smug, a nice one for the fans to coo, "Ooh! It makes you think, doesn't it? But then Roald does that all the time ..." Ironically, i'm pretty sure Anthony Horowitz is no stranger to Dahl's work (and it will be interesting to compare both men's The Hitchhiker), but i prefer his way with a twist(ed) ending, at least i do if the Horowitz Horrors are anything to go by.

Jeremy Dyson and Polly Findlay made a blink-and-you-missed-it appearance on London Tonight earlier, promoting Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales. Didn't really learn anything from it, to be honest. As much time was given to rerunning the opening credits from the TV series as was spent on discussing the new stage production, but Dyson managed to explain that he wanted to do this adaptation because he didn't think the TV series "showed the stories in their best light." A few seconds of Polly Findlay as "a little old lady with a sinister hobby" - taxidermy - and we were whisked back to the divine Riz Lateef in the studio for the latest on the war versus fly-tippers and some street where rats are getting into all the houses or something.

[monker]

Jan 26, 2011 16:38:36 GMT Jojo Lapin X said:

Jan 26, 2011 12:15:16 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Surely the point is that Hitler's siblings really died that young - did the likes of Stalin have similar domestic backgrounds?

To be sure Stalin also was born, had parents, etc. My point is that the Dahl story has no point.

The point being - what cruel tricks fate plays upon us (If you'll allow ), I suppose, but I know what you mean. It doesn't really show a lot of creativity from the author and in that way it's a bit of a cheat.

[cw67q]

I haven't read the story and can't comment on its merits, but from the decription there would seem to be a pretty clear point to the story: real life monsters are human; the son who's birth brings joy to his mother can survive to be a terror. Whether or not the point is of interest to a given reader is a different matter.

Anthologising the same story about every monster in history would make for a pretty dull collection. But then if you took any story and merely repeated it with the names changed it wouldn't hold interst much I suspect.

- Chris

[franklinmarsh]

Can't remeber the Dahl story, but it puts me in mind of Ira Levin's The Boys From Brazil, with the fantastical idea that the old ex-nazis have not only cloned 94 (?) little Hitlers but are attempting to recreate similar environments (or at least events in the lives of) the children.