Overview

Storties included: The Visor, The Great Switcheroo, The Last Act, Bitch.

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9780140041798

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No other writer - except perhaps John Collier - has come within Kiss-Kiss-ing distance of Saki while other stories of that still earlier collection, Skin, Taste, and Nunc Dimittis are as nearly classic as anyone can remember. Of course Lamb to the Slaughter - courtesy of Hitchcock - is his most widely known. Dahl can (or could) refine the shudder into a frisson, finesse the reader out of his most unnerved expectations, and like Maupassant or O. Henry upend a story on a turnabout of surprise. Here these qualities are retained, force mineure, and there are none of the old subtleties of style. All have a sexual inclination beginning with The Visitor, an episode from the Casanovan diaries of a great philanderer-bon vivant, an Uncle Oswald trapped in a fantastic castle in the Sinai desert. Uncle Oswald appears to lesser advantage in the last piece Bitch. In between there's the incognito suburban wife-swapping in Switcheroo and the more original The Last Act in which a woman, contemplating her own suicide, is driven to destruction by an overly attentive former suitor, a doctor. Modestly diverting - but one misses the imaginative flair and the truly tapered touch of evil synonomous with Dahl at his malevolent worst-best. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter pilot, chocolate historian and medical inventor. He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG and many more brilliant stories. He remains THE WORLD'S NUMBER ONE STORYTELLER.

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