“The Landlady”
Teenager Billy Weaver rents a room at a B&B in Bath from an older landlady. It is a charming place rented at a price too get too to pass up. Strangely, the guest book contains only two names over the course of the past two years. Stranger still: he recognizes one of the names as young fellow who mysterious disappeared. The delayed recognition that a dog and parrot are both no longer live, but have been stuffed through taxidermy gives way to a startling revelation about the landlady.
“William and Mary”
One of the creepiest stories in the Dahl canon—perhaps of anyone’s canon—begins with the death of William and the reception by his wife of a lawyer with outlining detailed precepts of his will she never knew was coming. Although far too complicated to explain in detail, suffice to say that William is not entirely dead: there is a brain and an eye and consciousness. The put-upon Mary, whom William dominated during his regular life, is about to find out just pleasant a normal death can be compared to the unpleasantness of a distinctly abnormal life.
“The Way up To Heaven”
Mrs. Foster has a pathological fear of being late. Her cruel husband enjoys tormenting her by taking steps to ensure she runs late. Mrs. Foster is on her way to the airport to catch a plane to Paris to spend time with her daughter when Mr. Foster plays out his cruelty for the last time. As she rushes up to house to see what is taking him so long, she hears a sound from inside and changes her mind, rushing back to the taxi and leaving without him. When she returns a few weeks later, she is greeted by a large pile of mail and an unpleasant odor emanating from the in-home elevator. With some satisfaction, she dials up the elevator repairman.
“Parson’s Pleasure”
A shifty antiques dealer named Mr. Boggis makes a habit of ripping people off their belongings by disguising himself as a parson collecting for the poor only to sell them at a ridiculous profit in his store. He arrives at the home of a farmer named Rummins and spots a rare, almost priceless commode actually made by Thomas Chippendale. He convinces Rummins of the worthlessness of the piece and manages to buy for twenty pounds what he thinks might pull in up to twenty-thousand pounds in auction. The only problem is that his scheme has involved convincing Rummins he just wants antique in order to cut off the legs so he can attach them to a table he owns, overlooking the fact that if Rummins is ignorant enough to rip off he might also be stupid enough to believe the gist of the story.
“Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat”
Mrs. Bixby is married to a dentist who believes her story that once a month she visits an aunt in Baltimore. In fact, she is having an affair, but that comes to an end with an unexpected gifting of a fur coat by her paramour, the colonel. To keep her husband from finding out the truth, she arranges to pawn the mink and tell her husband she found the ticket. The tables are turned on the adulterous wife when her husband presents her with a ratty stole rather than the fur coat she pawned…which is being worn by her husband’s attractive secretary.
“Royal Jelly”
Mabel is concerned that her baby daughter isn’t properly gaining weight and her husband Albert soothes her fears by adding royal jelly—secreted by honey bees—to the newborn’s diet. Soon enough, the baby is gaining weight substantially across her middle, though her extremities remain unusually skinny. Albert confesses to having consumed large amounts of royal jelly while trying to conceive the baby and Mabel begins to realize the similarity between her husband and a bee. The story ends on the infamous advice from husband to mother: “Why don’t you cover her up, Mabel? We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.”
“Georgy Porgy”
If “William and Mary” isn’t enough to give one nightmares and a reader can get to sleep without dreaming of giant bee babies, then try this one for size. It is a persistently Freudian nightmare about a sexually repressed vicar named George that involves cruel experiments with rats, the sight of a mother rabbit eating her young after birth and George being swallowed whole by one of the many “predatory” and “ravenous” creatures known as women. The narration actually continues from inside the woman’s body after he has been swallowed as an unnervingly symbolic confession of a madman inside an asylum.
“Genesis and Catastrophe”
A woman in Austria gives birth to a son and is consumed by the fear this child will succumb to death immediately just as her previous three did. Her fears are subsumed by the attentive positivity of the midwife and doctor who both clamor for the husband to join in the process of providing compassion and support. The reader is drawn into this compulsivity toward the positive and is invited to become an active participant in cheering on the woman toward a successful birth. The twist being that the young child will grow up to become somewhat famous: the parents are Klara and Alois Hitler.
“Edward the Conqueror”
Franz Liszt remains one of the greatest geniuses the world of classical music ever produced. Louisa comes into possession of a cat that she comes to believe for a variety of perfectly understandable reasons is the reincarnate spirit of Liszt. So convinced is Louisa she makes plans to let the entire world know about this special cat, plans that her husband, Edward, is equally convinced is only going to make them laughingstocks for the rest of their lives. The story ends with Edward conquering his wife and permanently stifling her plans in the only way possible aside form killing his wife.
“Pig”
An allegory that compares the way the food industry raises animals for butchering as food to the way society butchers the innocent for profit and gain. A young orphan named Lexington learns how to become a fabulous cook but is never introduced to pork because his aunt who raised him found it disgusting. His introduction to pork involves grifting by a shyster lawyer and cheated by greedy workers in a greasy spoon. A guided tour of a slaughterhouse ends with Lexington upside down in chains and headed for being processed into meat himself.
“The Champion of the World”
Recurring Dahl character Claud Cubbage’s latest in a long line of schemes this time involves soaking raisins in a solution spiked with Seconal in order to drug pheasants, making them easier to poach. This is all done for the singular purpose of Claud getting a measure of revenge against a socially uppity neighbor. All is working well, but before the revenge can be enjoyed, the drugs begin to wear off and all 120 bagged pheasants make their escape.
