This review was written by Gordon Williams and printed in the February 23, 1961 edition of Australasian Post.
A chiller for heat wave times…
THRILLS FROM A COLD HEART!
IF Mr Roald Dahl and Mr Alfred Hitchcock ever meet in a working partnership, we may expect such pictures as will place the normal spine in permanent deep freeze.
But before such a getting-together could be cinematically effective, Mr Dahl would have to agree that the horror content of his stories should be whittled down, for even Mr Hitchcock would not be able to translate some of this writer’s material into censor-acceptable form.
Really. Mr Dahl has a wicked imagination — not in the moral sense, but in its ability to produce shock after shock, then, just when you feel that the whole thing is becoming a little too much, you catch the author dropping a lld lightly over his left eye, and lifting his mouth in the ghost of a smile.
So, having been shocked, you are splendidly reassured — and you move on to his next story. perfectly ready for the mixture as before.
For the volume we have before us this week is a book of short storles — short shorts, medium shorts, and one or two rather long (but not too long) shorts.
It bears the strange title Kiss Kiss, which must be one of Mr Dahl’s little jokes. Anything like osculation repeated is notably absent from the volume, although there are romantic elements in it.
This collection of 11 stories has not one dull line. Even when Mr Dahl is writing with disarming calm, and in quiet, unobtrusive prose, you have the idea that just around the corner of the next paragraph a shock lies waiting That expectation does not destroy enjoyment. It is like that of a connolsseur who sips his wine, and waits for its flavor and its bouquet and all the other nice things wine is supposed to have to report themselves to him.
Take, for example, the story of Georgy Porgy.
Georgy Porgy is a vicar. He is short, shy, rather rabbit-toothed, obtuse (he was given to hour-long recitals on the development of the madrigal through the centuries—recitals made anywhere, any place, any time, happily Mr Dahl gives us no excepts from them).
Georgy Porgy is just about as ordinary as a man may be. Bnt he has a phobia. He cannot bear that a woman should touch him, even in the polite practice of handshaking. Yet he admires women, he likes ’em.
Of course, you know that there has been something very nasty in the woodshed of his childhood to bring this about. Mr Dahl tells us what it is.
And I’m darned If I’m going to spoll a fine piece of shock-writing by telling you about that here.
At any rate, all the spinsters of the village made a direct attack on him. Probably it was his aloofness. Probably his simplicity. Probably the ladies sensed his fear of them, and his frightened yearning for them. But go for him they did.
Well, we have an amusing series of episodes in which our Georgy Porgy plays out the game of the vicar versus the vixens. He tries an experiment with rats — he separates the sexes, then after a while, he places them in a box — the rat-ladies on one side of a small electrifled wire barrier, the rat-gentlemen on the other. The electric charge is lethal.
First to try to storm the barrier is a lady-rat, to whom Georgy gives the name of one of his spinster parishioners. She dies on the wire in her glorlous quest for male companionship.
Then another lady rat tries, and dies, and another.
But the gentlemen-rats do nothing at all. They just sit and wait, watching the corpses of the lady-rats pile up.
In one stroke, says Georgy, I had laid open the incredibly lascivious, stop-at-nothing nature of the female. My own sex was vindicated; myconscience clear …
Georgy had his ideas about Woman the Hunter, you see.
However, at last Georgy, who is fed fruit punch laced, without his knowledge, with a potent spirit, accompanies Miss Roach, a massive, Juno-esque type, in a short walk along the garden path. Georgy, with the strong liquor burning away his Inhibitions, is kissed by Miss Roach.
Then—well, you must read the story of his violent revulsion, his terror.
How does this end?
Poor Georgie, never too stable mentally, goes right around the bend. He develops the idea he has been swallowed by Miss Roach and fancies that he has taken up residence—well, I won’t say any more.
But if you can read it without being fascinated, and shocked, you ought to try yourself out for spacemanship.
Remember, though, that no matter how deep Mr Dahl’s imaginative way leads you, you will always be aware of his wink-smile.
Then we have a story about that product of the beehive, royal jelly. Mr Dahl makes great play, in a softly sinister fashion, with the claims made for this substance, which (he assures us, in the words of apiarist Albert Taylor) increases the weight of the honeybee larva fifteen hundred times in five days!
Now Mr and Mrs Albert Taylor have just been blessed with a baby daughter, who just won’t eat and who loses weight in frightening fashion.
So Albert, relieving his good wife on the night shift with baby, feeds her huge portions of royal jelly from his hives—”it’s millionaire’s food,” he assures his wife. “It costs £240 a jar full.”
Mother Taylor is a little perturbed by the massive amounts Albert feeds the child, but he reassures her. He reveals that he, himself, has been swallowing it in great quantities for some time.
And she notices that Albert has
…a thick, plump, pulpy-looking body that was built close to the ground on abbreviated legs. The legs were slightly bowed. The head was huge and round, covered with bristly, short-cut hair, and the greater part of the face—now that he had given up shaving altogether—was hidden by a brownish yellow fuzz about an inch long. In one way and another, he was grotesque to look at, there as no denying that…
You catch on, of course. What looks good on a bee looks terrible on a human being.
Mother Taylor seems to have awakened too late—but this time, the puny little baby, with huge dollops of R.J. fed to it at every feeding time, grows rather more than apace.
Once again, I can’t tell you the denouement of this tale.
Not all the tales in this collection centre in terror, or wild fantasy, or horror. Some nice irony enters, as in the story of the antique dealer who goes tound in the guise of a churchman, buying for ridiculous prices the genuine but unrecognised pieces of Chippendale, Sheraton, Inigo Jones, and of the rest of the masters of design that he finds in humble cottages.
He is a nasty, cheating acquisitive type, this Mr Boggis, but he is as cunning as a fox, as guileful as a Hollywood deb. star, and as greedy as Billy Bunter.
But Mr Boggis is trapped in a snare he has set himself, and we watch him about to writhe in sheer physical pain as a masterpiece worth a cool £20,000 is reduced to splinters before his outraged eyes—and all because he had set such an event in train…
The story titled Willam and Mary in Mr Dahl’s present collection probably wins the Oscar for originality, and for its blend of humor, satire, and thumping shockfulness—(that’s the only word for it)—which plays so many variations on mood that the reader is held in fascination.
It is not a story that lends itself to condensation, but it is one that makes for nerve-tense reading.
(Don’t worry too much about that. As I’ve sald, Mr Dahl always has a sedative ready if you look like becoming too jangled.)
In all, this is an engrossing book of tales by a master of the type of short story that, while it deals essentially with behavior and character analyses, provides blistering shock and, often, wry humor.