I vote, more of this:
1) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
Dahl’s description of the taste of Wonka’s Whipple–Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight as Charlie eats it is merely words on a page. And yet, however many years or even decades it now is since one first read it, it still feels like the most delicious, luxuriant, succulent, sumptuous thing that any of us has ever actually eaten. The moment when Charlie sees the gold ticket peeping out from beneath the wrapper is pure magic too – has childish excitement ever been more brilliantly conveyed? And to think Martin Amis recently disparagingly said that he might well write a children’s book only “if I had a serious brain injury”. Clever fellows really can talk twaddle sometimes, can’t they.
2) A Dip in the Pool (1952)
Having bet his and his wife’s life-savings that the ocean-liner on which they’re cruising will make poor progress, the doomed hero of this grown-up short story befriends a kindly old woman on deck before hurling himself overboard before her eyes in an attempt to slow everything down. He never finds out, however, that she is not quite all there – moments later, after she has watched him flailing in the ship’s ever-lengthening wake, she tells her disbelieving carer about the curious incident. “Such a nice man,” she insists. “He waved to me.”
3) Danny, the Champion of the World (1975)
The point when the 120 drugged pheasants, packed together like sardines in a pram, begin to soar out of it, only to start flopping desultorily back to earth as their still partially narcotised wings fail them. It’s one of Dahl’s funniest passages, told with a vividness and relish strong by even his standards.
4) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977)
This wonderfully convincing fantasy’s extraordinary description of a candle’s flame, starting with the yellow outside, then the blue bit, with the black core at its centre. Has anyone who ever read this ever looked at a lit candle in the same way again?
5) Lamb to the Slaughter (1953)
The moment in this short story when the police – investigating the murder of fellow copper Patrick Maloney – find a formerly frozen leg of lamb in the oven, now completely cooked. This must be the only story ever written in which the cops eat the murder weapon. Genius.
6) Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
Vermicious knids! (With the “k” sounded, of course.) Has a disagreeable alien ever been endowed with a better name? The fact that these ovine beasties are also inveterate show-offs, and know only one word of English – scram – which they spell out in mid-air, only adds to the comedy.
7) The Landlady (1959)
Two of Dahl’s smartest tricks were his ability merely to hint at danger, and – similarly – to cut his short-stories dead before reaching a conventional conclusion. This one (first seen in The New Yorker) is the supreme example. Checking into a quiet B&B, Billy Weaver finds the last two names in the book before his ringing a vague bell – but he dismisses the thought. Every time you read this, as Billy eyes the stuffed animals in this lonely house, you will him to get the hell out. But before long, the apparently good-natured woman serves him tea “that tasted faintly of bitter almonds” (ie cyanide – another mere taste, as it were, of darkness). And, with similarly perfect authorial understatement on Dahl’s part, the story ends with her kindly answer to Billy’s enquiry as to whether anyone at all, apart from he and those other two, has stayed there in recent years. “No, my dear,” she says. “Only you.”
8) The Great Switcheroo (1974)
Dahl’s dark-hued moralising flowered particularly memorably in this tale from his most explicitly adult short-story collection, Switch Bitch. It reads like a cautionary tale for would-be swingers everywhere – over-confident studs, in particular – and the conclusion, as so often with Dahl, is as unforgiving as it is hilarious.
9) James and the Giant Peach (1961)
The moment when Aunts Spiker and Sponge are crushed by the now enormous fruit. The thrills! The excitement! The satisfaction! Revenge has never – in any sense – tasted sweeter.
10) Pig (1960)
This short story from the collection Kiss Kiss is one of the most brutal – and brilliant – things Dahl ever wrote. Essentially a cautionary tale about the morbid dangers of over-protecting children – with a nice side-swipe at vegetarianism, too – it is packed with linguistic and stylistic references to Voltaire’s Candide. But, where the French master’s masterpiece concludes with his protagonist blithely cultivating his garden, this ends with the similarly ingénu hero, Lexington, being strung up and slaughtered like the titular ungulate. In a final, jet-black nod to the Voltaire, it ends with him passing “out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next”.
