Happy Birthday Roald Dahl: Dive into his remarkable legacy through the lens of his adult short fiction

It is characteristic among lifelong readers to occasionally bring up the beloved works of Roald Dahl — more a prose artist than just an author, an absurdist if there ever was one. Some of his most iconic stories are children's books, and encountering The Twits or Danny the Champion of the World for the very first time, even as an adult, is an unforgettable experience. To this day, his prowess as a children's author and an entertainer remains unmatched. Yet, on his 108th birth anniversary today, there is another side of his work that remains in the shadows — a collection of strange and captivating adult fiction.

Known for crafting fantastic worlds rooted in intrusive thoughts you may have had as a child, Dahl uses his keen insight to anticipate an adult reader's strangest desires, weaving them into astonishing tales of hopelessness, disgust, and craving. Macabre, satirical, and absurdist elements aren’t typically associated with a beloved children's author, but the theory goes: his mind was at work on children's stories while his body tackled writing for similarly motivated adults.

Stories from his anthologies include Royal Jelly which explores a beekeeper's obsession with bees to the point of seeing his newborn daughter almost turn into a fat bee. Skin explored the finicky immortality of art and an artist's legacy while his four-part series Switch Bitch served up tales packed with unsettling sexual themes layered with absurdist contexts for Playboy, long before he published Matilda.

Here’s an excerpt from one of his stories, Bitch:

“What I intend to do,’ he said, ‘is to produce a perfume which will have the same electrifying effect upon a man as the scent of a bitch in heat has upon a dog! One whiff and that’ll be it! The man will lose all control. He’ll rip off his pants and ravish the lady on the spot!’

‘We could have some fun with that,’ I said.

‘We could rule the world!’ he cried.”

The public image Dahl was fitted into remained rather superficial, largely due to the overwhelming popularity of his internationally acclaimed children's stories. But at his core, the man was “a stereotypical mid-century wealthy imperial Brit — a bullhorn of prejudice and entitlement whose gaffes could be almost touchingly clueless” as commented by Sam Anderson, appearing in the New Yorker. His adult writing attests to this, and there's a sardonic irony in the fact that the success of his children's fiction stems from his ability to subtly inject the darker aspects of his personality — and thus these themes — into books like James and the Giant Peach or The Twits.

In 2023, hundreds of words were changed or removed in recent British editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and other works, in an effort to make them less offensive. Author Salman Rushdie called this ‘censorship’. Some of these changes border on the absurd, like altering ‘man-eating giant’ to ‘human-eating giant’ in The BFG—a bizarre attempt at inclusivity. These edits feel more like profit-driven efforts than genuine inclusivity, as the violent themes remain unchanged, regardless of a few altered words.

While more than two hundred million copies of his books are in print, they have inspired countless television and film adaptations, from Broadway's Matilda The Musical to more recently The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More, where whimsical filmmaker Wes Anderson executes four strange stories from his adult fiction collection with a stellar cast comprising of Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes and Dev Patel. Wes also directed a delightful adaptation of Dahl’s beloved Fantastic Mr Fox in 2009.

Dahl remains one of the most widely-read authors of both his time and ours. While his success might be partially attributed to his status and the favourable era in which he was born, it’s his unmistakable lyricism and distinctive personified narratives that truly set him apart, giving even modern speculative writers a run for their money. However, it's the undeniable sense that his work was fuelled by the mad genius of a man who delighted in the quirks of storytelling that likely gives his stories their enduring appeal.