The Best of Roald Dahl, Paperback/Roald Dahl

If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with -The Landlady, - the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written -Pig, - a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in -Man From the South, - who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife. But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own. -Dahl has the mastery of plot and characters possessed by great writers of the past, along with a wildness and wryness of his own. One of his trademarks is writing beautifully about the ugly, even the horrible.--- Los Angeles Times -An ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation are the...strengths of Dahl's storytelling.--- New York Times Book Review