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Rating: 
Summary: Brisk and bold
Review: An easy read, well-plotted, and often surprising, these four stories should please most readers with a taste for the ironic. The philandering, eccentric character of "Uncle Oswald" is a hedonistic delight, and the two stories involving him are certainly the better half of this small collection. It takes a masterful writer to make such an amoral protagonist work, in any context. The other two tales, involving a wife-swapping and a widow ready to try intimacy again, are less gripping, and a bit anticlimactic with their payoffs.
Rating:
Summary: Brisk and bold
Review: An easy read, well-plotted, and often surprising, these four stories should please most readers with a taste for the ironic. The philandering, eccentric character of "Uncle Oswald" is a hedonistic delight, and the two stories involving him are certainly the better half of this small collection. It takes a masterful writer to make such an amoral protagonist work, in any context. The other two tales, involving a wife-swapping and a widow ready to try intimacy again, are less gripping, and a bit anticlimactic with their payoffs.
Rating: 
Summary: the most entertaining short story writer
Review: As Dahl goes, this is an acutely uneven collection of short stories. Interesting that I loved the two written about unmarried people, and barely liked the two written about married people...
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I had hoped.
Review: I checked this out on tape from the library for a long car trip, and I was excited to experience some "adult" work from the author of my beloved _Matilda_ and _The Witches_.I was pretty gripped by the first story; I found the character to be very layered and interesting. Dahl included a lot of elements that lent depth to the character. But the ending disappointed me; it was so gimmicky! I felt rather cheated, as though the whole story had been a long road to a cheap punch line. What about all that character detail? Had it been for nothing? The rest of the stories seemed the same way, too. I wouldn't call the book "worthless." It was certainly entertaining. But by the third story, all I could do was listen and try to guess what the next punch line would be, and the layers of the characters seemed to lose all meaning.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I had hoped.
Review: I checked this out on tape from the library for a long car trip, and I was excited to experience some "adult" work from the author of my beloved _Matilda_ and _The Witches_. I was pretty gripped by the first story; I found the character to be very layered and interesting. Dahl included a lot of elements that lent depth to the character. But the ending disappointed me; it was so gimmicky! I felt rather cheated, as though the whole story had been a long road to a cheap punch line. What about all that character detail? Had it been for nothing? The rest of the stories seemed the same way, too. I wouldn't call the book "worthless." It was certainly entertaining. But by the third story, all I could do was listen and try to guess what the next punch line would be, and the layers of the characters seemed to lose all meaning.
Rating:
Summary: Great short stories from a master
Review: Roald Dahl could easily be the best ever writer of 'twist in the tale' short stories. A few years ago in the UK ( and I'm sure on PBS in the USA ) there was a television show called "Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected" in which some of his stories were dramatized. It was not too successful and I suspect that the reason was that Mr.Dahl's stories are stories to be read. That is, read on a dark night, with a strong drink close at hand, by the light of a single reading lamp.... Then you get the full effect. Yes, these stories are chilling and bizarre and simply wonderful. Though it is not in this book, everyone should read Mr.Dahl's story entitled 'Pig'. In this reviewer's opinion that was the best story that he ever wrote. The word 'shocking' does not even come close.
Rating:
Summary: the most entertaining short story writer
Review: Roald Dahl, perhaps the most entertaining short story writer ever to grace the world with his genius, created a world unto itself in this collection of four short stories, a world in which the characters are eccentrically unforgettable, the plots are sensually graphic, and the endings are climactically uproarious with emotional impact. Dahl is a master of forming stories that ferment over the time it takes the reader to read them and, in his trademark endings, explode with surprise and joy.
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