Someone Like You by Roald Dahl

A Golden Ticket to the Land of Terror.....

     I recently read The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, and there among the many mentions of other literary works, was one about a short story that I had read in high school and I remember my entire class feeling fascinated at the end of reading it. The story was "Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl.

    Roald Dahl was a stranger to me back when I was in high school. This was just before the internet took over and when Enid Blyton and Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew were our staple reading material. Imagine the surprise when I realised that " one of the greatest storytellers for children" also wrote for adults!! So thanks to Ms. Zevin, I picked this book up to read.

    Someone like You is a collection of 18 short stories. Some of these stories like Taste, Dip in the Pool, My Lady Love, My Dove have originally appeared in The New Yorker. A few of these classics have been adapted into movies or television series ( the infamous Alfred Hitchcock Presents series) so even if you know how the story ends do read them to appreciate  Roald Dahl's writing and his magic magic.

  Let's take sneak peek into a couple of stories from the collection.

   Lamb to the Slaughter and Man from the South are fairly well known so skipping those...

  In Dip in the Pool, William Botibol a passenger on board a British cruise ship bids  200 GBP on a betting pool where passengers try to guess the number of miles the ship would travel on a given day. Botibol bets on a "low field" hoping the bad weather would slow the ship down. He wakes up to find a bright, sunny weather and the ship having made up its course. Botibol immediately sets about staging "an accident" but destiny has a mind of it's own.

  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned in Nunc Dimitiss,when Lionel Lampson designs an elaborate revenge on his younger girlfriend Janet de Palagia.

   A wine connoisseur's skills are put to the test at a dinner party in Taste. Richard Pratt  stands to win two houses from Mike Shofield, the host if he can guess what wine is being served at the table. The stakes are doubled when Pratt seeks Mike's daughter, Louise's hand in marriage.

   Besides Lamb to the Slaughter and Man from the South I enjoyed reading Nunc Dimittis and Mr. Feasey. Tales of terror, tales of macabre, watch out for the twist in the end of each tale.