Tales of the Unexpected

 

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

To me, nothing seems like a worse omen than beginning a new year in a reading rut. It’s taken me more than a week to overcome it, but I’m finally here; having just closed to the cover on Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected: a book that took me way longer to finish than was necessary. 

Tales of the Unexpected is a collection of mature short stories from one of my favourite children’s authors. They share a common theme of strangeness, wackiness, and sinisterness, sadly with most of them finishing before you really sink your teeth into it. Beginning with a tale in which a father jokingly bets his daughter’s hand in marriage in a wine-tasting gamble and finishing with a couple who believe they have found the reincarnation of Liszt in a stray cat, Tales of the Unexpected can be best described as a quirky collection of Dahl’s experimental forays into genre. 

There’s a lot happening within its pages, ranging from thriller to science fiction, and potentially even horror. While some of the stories are dark and twistedly funny and satisfyingly whole, such as Lamb to the Slaughter, which tells the story of a women killing her husband with a leg of lamb and then feeding the murder weapon to the investigating officers, others read a little more like introductory snippets for a wider story that gets cut off as soon as some real drama starts happening. While every idea is different and interesting indeed, there are some definite hit and miss moments with stories landing a high score, while others left me wanting more. I think it was this strange mixture of complete and incomplete that made me struggle with this book. 

Image credit: Wikipedia

Although I was left feeling more or less unaffected by this book, I still believe that it’s worth delving into, as it shows a different and unexplored side of a celebrated author. There’s intelligence, versatility, and dark underlying humour in every tale. 

Author: Roald Dahl, 1954-69

Published: First seven published in Someone Like You, by Secker & Warburg, 1954. Remaining stories published in Kiss Kiss, by Michael Joseph, 1960. All stories published in Twenty-Nine Kisses From Roald Dahl, Michael Joseph 1969.