I have been seeing copies of Roald Dahl’s anthology of ghost stories for a long time but I put off buying the book for a long time for no apparent reason but finally I buckled under and purchased it two years ago and finally it was chosen.
As Roald Dahl personally chose the stories (originally part of a film project that fell through) I expected a lot of nasty and twisted tales, after all Dahl’s own short stories can be pretty gruesome within themselves but, as with all short story collections, the quality varies and I ended up liking five of them, with the first two being some of the best short stories I’ve read in a long time.
The first piece is a metaphysical story called W.S., in where a writer meets one of the characters in his books, which leads to peculiar consequences and the second story is Harry, which cannot be explained here as I will give away everything but all I can say is the ending will have you reaching for a tissue.
The remaining stories verge from ok to mediocre, with lots of scenarios repeated, in fact there’s an inferior version of ‘Harry’ towards the end of the book. On the whole I was disappointed but I was glad that I read it.
The Bobsphere 