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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, chapter 10 is pretty rough, particularly this stark line:
"Slowly but surely, everybody in the house began to starve."
I read the book to my daughter a few years back and I'd forgotten quite how bleak things are before all the fun stuff that people remember.
Roald Dahl did not fuck around. He grew up in one of those psychopathic early-20th-century British boarding schools, and then went to Africa once he graduated, and World War 2 broke out and he fought in Egypt and Greece.
He wrote children's literature because kids tend to vibe with how his brain works, but he was not playing games. Read his adult short stories sometime.
Edit: From his autobiography, from early on in his time in Africa:
Suddenly, the voice of a man yelling in Swahili exploded into the quiet of the evening ... He was yelling from somewhere behind the house. "Simba, bwana! Simba! Simba!"
Simba is Swahili for lion. All three of us leapt to our feet, and the next moment Mdisho came tearing round the corner of the house yelling at us in Swahili. "Come quick, bwana! Come quick! Come quick! A huge lion is eating the wife of the cook!"
That sounds pretty funny when you put it on paper back here in England, but to us, standing on a veranda in the middle of East Africa, it was not funny at all.
Robert Sanford flew into the house and came out again in five seconds flat holding a powerful rifle and ramming a cartridge into the breech. "Get those children indoors!" he shouted to his wife as he ran down off the veranda with me behind him.
Yeah, I've read a couple, one about a frozen leg of lamb, I remember. He was a pretty dark character, including holding some deeply offensive views.
Talented guy when he was focusing his work though - there was a great anthology TV series in the UK called Tales of the Unexpected, some episodes of which I think were based on his more adult writing (including the leg of lamb one).
Are you gonna try to tell me the oompa-loompas weren't so much happier moving to England and working in the factory instead of being in their home
But listen to them singing their working-songs
They were paid in cocoa beans... 😖
Any particular adult stories you'd like to recommend?
Holy hell, dude... I'm looking over the list now and just reading plot synopses is getting me unsettled.
Honestly I think the two autobiographical books, "Boy" and "Going Solo" are probably better than the short stories unless you're in a pretty twisted mood. If you're in for the darker material, a random selection of short stories I liked:
- "Mr. Feasey" is a very mild one that still has the Roald Dahl dark energy about it.
- "Pig" is a deeply unsettling one.
- "They Shall Not Grow Old" is haunting but quite good.
- "Man From The South" is a fairly famous one that's also very dark and unsettling.
She was a strict vegetarian and regarded the consumption of animal flesh as not only unhealthy and disgusting, but horribly cruel. She lived upon lovely clean foods like milk, butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, nuts, herbs, and fruit and she rejoiced in the conviction that no living creature would be slaughtered on her account, not even a shrimp. Once, when a brown hen of hers passed away in the prime of life from being eggbound, Aunt Glosspan was so distressed that she nearly gave up egg-eating altogether.
Lol
That story is really strange though
I'll add "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." It's my favorite by far, but I like all of the stories in "The Umbrella Man and other stories."