Roald Dahl: The Collected Short Stories

This chunky omnibus is a lavish buffet of short fiction, spiced with the macabre and the mysterious, with dollops of black humor and surprises galore.

The 760-page compilation has five sections, with shorts taken from such best-selling collections as Kiss Kiss, Over to You, Switch Bitch, Someone Like You and More Tales of the Unexpected. There are 48 pieces in all, most of which have a sting in the end; tales of greed and vanity and worse, which demonstrate Dahl's grasp of character and plot and his keen sense of irony.

In Kiss Kiss, the first section of the book, we encounter an array of characters - from the murderously kooky old dame in The Landlady to Mr Foster who comes to a sorry end in the most unexpected of ways in The Way up to Heaven. In William and Mary, William offers his brain up to science but inadvertently makes himself vulnerable to a wife hell-bent on getting even. In Parson’s Pleasure, Mr Boggis sets out to con country folk – with disastrous results. And there’s Genesis and Catastrophe, where we are given a bedside account of the birth of Adolf Hitler that's creepy in its subtleties and ironic in its conclusion.

In the second part of the book titled Over to You, Dahl weaves stories with threads drawn from his wartime experiences as a fighter pilot. There are ten tales in all, with Katina being, in this reviewer’s opinion, the most memorable for its poignancy; a story of a little girl who comes under the protective wing of Dahl’s fighter squadron in Greece, but eventually becomes a casualty of war. Madame Rosette is about the flyboys on furlough in Cairo, encountering a virago in the process of exploring that city’s nightlife. And Beware of the Dog tells of an RAF pilot who is shot out of the sky and regains consciousness in a hospital he assumes to be British, till he discovers to his dismay that he is on the wrong side of the Channel - in Nazi-occupied France. 

Switch Bitch, the third section of the collection, comprises four adult stories with sexual themes. The Visitor is classic Dahl, with the libidinous protagonist getting his comeuppance in full measure. In The Great Switcheroo, a couple of men scheme to bed each other’s spouse unbeknownst to the women, while in The Last Act an unstable woman flies off the rails after her husband's untimely death. In Bitch, the last story in this section, a devious plan to embarrass a woman of standing backfires with delightful consequences for both intended victim and perpetrator.

Someone Like You and Eight Further Tales of the Unexpected, the fourth and fifth parts of this omnibus, are loaded with definitive Dahl stories like Taste, Lamb to the Slaughter, Dip in the Pool, Neck and The Bookseller. They perfectly round off a collection that’s worth every penny, paisa or peso spent on it.