The Concise Roald Dahl

by Mallory Ortberg · March 11, 2014

dahlJames and the Giant Peach – An abused child murders his family, then flees the country.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – A small boy becomes the owner of a multinational food and beverage conglomerate after witnessing the deaths of several children.

Fantastic Mr. Fox – Three sustainable-scale farmers are driven out of business.

Danny, the Champion of the World – A young man becomes class-conscious and participates in property destruction.

The Twits – A playful married couple with similar senses of humor die on the same day.

George’s Marvellous Medicine – A child becomes the sole caretaker for his verbally abusive grandmother. He poisons her.

The BFG – A deformed, flatulant stranger who controls the dreams of children enlists a little girl in his one-man war against a group of racist cannibals.

The Witches – A young boy is trapped forever inside the body of the mouse and is delighted to discover he will not outlive his grandmother.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – Charlie hires his elderly relatives as high-level executives in his new factory, rather than qualified applicants.

The Enormous Crocodile – A group of children watch an animal die.

Matilda – A violent and abusive school principal is allowed to quietly retire, without facing legal action for any of her crimes.

Tags: , ,

Related Posts

Mallory Ortberg

Mallory Ortberg

More from Mallory Ortberg →

75 Comments

      1. mbculver +6

        Although, to be fair, James doesn’t actually murder his aunts before he flees the country…

    2. ThatOtherWench +31

      This post perfectly encapsulates why every child should be given access to Roald Dahl and slight supervision during the reading thereof.

    1. GreenGrasses +16

      The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More has always been one of my favorite books. That story where the kid just rides the giant turtle into the sunset? It has never left my brain.

  5. naglayaxuliganka +6

    How does the Twits get the only quasi-positive synopsis? That book scarred me so badly. I couldn’t eat spaghetti for years (my brothers’ wriggling their plates to make it look alive certainly didn’t help).

  6. farrisonhord +15

    Boy
    Fucked up childhood, but not all together bad times, of a Scandinavian boy in England cultivates delightfully wicked storytelling skillz.

      2. lyetteann +18

        Yeah, the tonsil story certainly lodged itself in the “nightmare fuel” portion of my brain.

        1. bookwormV +6

          A girl in my class fainted when a teacher read out the adenoids section in a Year 7 English lesson.

    2. theskyrbeast +18

      I know Boy is horrifying, but there’s something about The Great Mouse Plot of 1924 that speaks to my soul. The follow-up volume Going Solo is also fascinating, although I read it before I had a good handle on imperialism, so I might need to revisit that one with my historian hat firmly on…

  7. unrealcity +32

    What makes this great is that Roald Dahl wrote horror stories before he switched to children’s lit. The creepiness was always there, he just changed his audience!

    1. Bumblebeebear +18

      Yes! When I was 12 or 13 my parents gave me a book of his stories for adults (the Roald Dahl Omnibus if anyone is interested) and as a kid who loved his children’s stories I just ate that book up. I haven’t read it in years and don’t know if it aged well but if it did I I highly recommend it for the kind of child who will be fascinated by a man being murdered so a collector can skin the tattoo off his back or a child being turned into a mutant bee baby from excess royal jelly consumption.

      1. lilsebastian01 +5

        Oh my god, I read The Umbrella Man at the same age but I was NOT READY and it freaked me the hell out. I remember the one where people were getting their fingers cut off in a card game, but I think I blocked the rest of it out.

        1. bumblebeebear +4

          AHHH Yes! Man from the South!!!! That was one of my favorites, I was a weird kid. Strangely, I always hated/couldn’t handle horror movies or even horror books (IT traumatized me for years after I read it in high school) but something about the specific kind of Roald Dahl creepy appealed to my twisted child brain in he most perfect way.

          1. bumblebeebear +3

            For context, my grandmother was German and gave me many copies of Max und Moritz and Struwwelpeter as a child so…that probably ruined my brain.

  8. anninyn +64

    Point of order: The children do not die in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory – at the end of the book they are all witnessed alive but disastrously, horribly changed by their experiences.

    Mutilation may be a better word.

    1. mbculver +8

      Violet’s fate gave me nightmares for years and made me pause before chewing gum for a very long time.

    2. Frumiosa +50

      I JUST REALIZED THE HUNGER GAMES IS AN ADAPTATION OF CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY AND NOW MY MIND IS BLOWN.

    1. EPWordsnatcher +38

      She kept a goddamn IRON MAIDEN in her office! She force-fed a child cake! She SWUNG A GIRL AROUND BY HER PIGTAILS, WHAT DOES IT TAKE WITH YOU PEOPLE.

      2. super_novice +27

        Yeah! The worst for me was actually when she first notices the girl’s pigtails and the girl sadly and quietly defends them by saying something along the lines of “my mom says I look cute.” AH it’s making me tear up and I don’t know whyyyy

      3. mbculver +12

        We are taking our daughter to see the Broadway show in June, and it’s going to take me that long to woman up to cope with seeing The Trunchbull in the flesh, so to speak.

      4. littlehuntingcreek +15

        Spare the rod, spoil the child. Discipline makes children, and our Country, Stronger!
        My kids LOVED this stuff

  10. grandma_nancy +38

    I credit the ending of The Witches with causing my first terrified awareness of my own mortality.

    1. logicbutton +20

      No, see, he was a special mouse. The kind that lives longer than a regular mouse, which we know because Grandmother says so, even though she has absolutely no reason to think this and probably is saying it more to herself than to him.

    1. gurukalehuru +2

      Read some of his adult stuff. Uncle Oswald is essentially James Bond, without all the spy nonsense.

  14. Rarespawn +4

    I love Roald Dahl. Maybe I don’t have a sense of humor, but I kind of feel like this trivializes his work. I think people who haven’t read Roald Dahl are missing out on a significant portion of life. This is not the brussel sprouts of life either, it is the equivalent of a chocolate cake portion of life.

    2. malloryelis +43

      “As a rule, you see, I’m not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James’s letter about Cousin Mabel’s peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle (‘Please read this carefully and send it on Jane’) the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It’s one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor – and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.”

    3. msjinxie +27

      Are you familiar with this website, and the other pieces that have been posted on this website?

      1. Rarespawn +3

        Yes, I am, and believe it or not, I do get the humor of it, but I’m struggling to really enjoy it. Perhaps I just want to see a companion piece about the good morals of his stories, such as Matilda (Just because you come from terrible people doesn’t mean you have to be a terrible person), James and the Giant Peach (If someone is treating you badly you don’t always just have to accept it, even if they are an authority figure over you), and the BFG (No matter how small you are, you can still find a way to make a big difference).

        I know it’s unfounded, but I can’t help but think some serious mom will read this and declare that her children will never read that awful nasty Roald Dahl, and some poor child will miss out on what I see as an essential part of my own childhood.

        2. ehmgeebee +27

          I think the Toastian tendency to reframe cherished childhood stories and authors is wonderful because it’s often shocking to recognize the brutality of the tales’ contexts and plots in retrospect, but it’s important. The terrors and weirdness that permeate classic childhood stories are part of what make those stories the classics.

          There’s a Maurice Sendak quote that captures this: “. . .from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”

          Being little and young is no picnic, and everybody can gather comfort and courage from encounters with imagined crises and villainy.

          XO you, Mallory and Nicole, for running pieces that acknowledge how all demographics need literature as equipment for living.

        3. Sugar&Spice +16

          When that final paragraph happens, then the poor child will just have to trundle themselves to the library, Matilda style. Then he/she will be inspired to plot gruesome revenge against Serious Mom, and it will all work out!

  15. Samk12345 +30

    Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator – poor people break glass ceiling, government officials freak out

  16. littlehuntingcreek +16

    I loved these when I was a kid and my kids loved these too. Obviously I have raised Sociopaths in my image

  17. figwiggin +26

    With “The Swan” you don’t even have to jokingly shorten it. Children literally kill a swan, cut its wings off, tie the dismembered, bloody wings to another child, and push him out of a tree.

      1. figwiggin +8

        I mean, granted, I don’t think that was one of his children’s stories. But still.

      2. literaltrousersnake +4

        Yeah really, that’s the plot, I wasn’t saying anything because I still have nightmares about it sometimes. It’s in Henry Sugar, along with the psychic card reader.

    2. Tafadhali +13

      After having tied him to train tracks.

      …I read the story a lot as a child. Not sure what this says about me.

      1. LeastBittern +1

        OK, yes, good. Did he die? Was he dead when his mother was cutting off the wings? Or did he actually fly home? Or did they dump his broken but not dead body on the front walk and leg it?

        1. Girl Named Jack +3

          I believe he momentarily transfigured into a swan and flew home. And then his mother cut off the wings? Memories of this are sketchy.

          1. Teka Lynn +1

            The narrator definitely states that he flew. He does make it home safely to his mother, who cries over him and ( IIRC) starts looking for something to cut the tied wings off his arms.

            That story freaked the HELL out of me as a kid. I could never read it more than wincingly.

  19. robot_dinosaur +26

    As a very bright child who frequently felt out of place and read through most of her elementary school classes, Matilda meant so much to me I cannot even say.

  20. Pwickup +10

    A friend told me that his mother did not allow him to read Roald Dahl as a child because she thought that the take-home message was essentially “Grownups don’t take care of children, children (or friendly monsters sometimes) have to go it alone.” I loved loved love all these stories, but I can see as how that’s a terrifying thought.

    Also, the Henry Sugar story about the guy who can see without his eyes (and has bits of dough smooshed into his eye sockets before they are bandaged to be extra sure it’s dark in there)?!!? It would not be a lie to say that that story forms a core part of my personal theology.

  22. Echolocation +16

    Did anyone else have a teacher who was adamant that the BFG did not fart, and we couldn’t call it farting because it didn’t smell. This is terrible logic, since everyone knows that farts do not always smell.

  23. betsymurgatroyd +6

    His Revolting Rhymes was something I read as an older teen and when I finished it I was like, this was for kids? You’re kidding right? Of course, I loved it. But then I learned that they were just a rhymed retelling of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But most kids don’t know the original tales are truly scary and awful.

    1. EPWordsnatcher +2

      Right there with you.

      (Book sidebar: I’m reading Rags and Bones right now, which is a collection of fairy tale/classic story retellings by a variety of authors and it’s gorgeous and creepy and great. If you like Revolting Rhymes, you’ll probably be all about it.)

  25. katylah +17

    little girl me thought the cinematic trunchbull was a good example of what happens when the patriarchy forces women into traditionally “feminine” roles. little girl me had BIG UPS FOR THE TRUNCHBULL’S FEMINISM BUT WAS NOT REALLY ABOUT THE ABUSE OF CHILDREN