Dahl, Roald

(British, 1916–1990)

Although Dahl wrote hugely successful children's fiction, his adult fiction and particularly his stories are also well regarded. Some of those stories were translated to television as Tales of the Unexpected; read them in The Collected Stories of Roald Dahl (1992). Dahl is a master of stories with unexpected twists at the end. ‘The Visitor’, from his collection Switch Bitch (1974), is a good example of his method. The narrator's Uncle Oswald, later to have a volume to himself, describes a visit to Abdul-Aziz and his beautiful wife and daughter, in the Sinai desert. Uncle Oswald believes that during the night one or other of them has visited his bed; the truth turns out to be somewhat different! Dahl's taste for the gruesome, so evident in his children's books, is often present in his adult writing.

Edgar Allan Poe. See CHILDHOOD  IP