Rating: 
Summary: Nate Barber's review of Roald Dahl
Review: Review, Roald Dahl
The best of Roald Dahl
review by Nate Barber Many people know Roald Dahl from his famous books such as James and The Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda but it's in his collection of short stories we get to see his cynical and sometimes perverse voice seep through. This type of book is a special window to any authors work, as it is a collection of shorts and not one solid body of work the author is required by form to stretch their voice to match the different stories, especially if they're as diverse as Dahl's list.
That's not to say there isn't any familiar traits to Dahl's text. Throughout each short story (you find this best reading the work out loud) is a refined word choice, a deliberate construction of each story, and inherent of this is a sense of closeness between the work and the author. Roald Dahl leaves behind his trademark fary-tail sensibilities for stories such as Man From the South and The Sound Machine, delicate stories balancing between quaint and relaxing settings and characters to a chilled insane climax. Fingers are chopped with cigar tippers and flowers are murdered.
Contrast this with Parsons Pleasure, a sharp look into the dirty underbelly of antique collectors and the perverted routines they keep to make a find. Dahl's works with his breathless attention to detail allows him to leave scene at just the right moment, take a breath and ground the reader in a library where Henry Sugar finds a book that'll change his all too comfortable life. And seamlessly, Dahl picks it up where he left the action, but now the last scene's slightly evolved, or time passed to provide the story with a delicious sense of rocketing momentum. Roald Dahl likes to move things along whether we're paying attention or not, this will always suck readers as distracted as myself back to the page with something new, disgusting or touching or bordering on a psychotic meltdown, there's enough to gorge on the pages alone.
If you love the refined (spelled-with-a-'u') humour and BBC comedies frequent on public broadcasting networks, the otherworldly dimensions of Vonnegut and the twilight zone, the comic and useless violence of epics best represented by Night Of The Living Dead then, Dahl's your guy. Great for nightmares.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best short story writers around.
Review: Roald Dahl left a large body of work, much of which seems to be finding its way back into print in these years after his death. Good! For those acquainted only with his childrens' books, be warned: he had a sharp wit and he knew how to use it in adult fiction. My favorite short story? "Parson's Pleasure." Stunningly crafted, and timeless today in a world gone bonkers over antiques, Antiques Roadshows, and provenance.
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