Word: dahle
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...Author Dahl's gallery of females includes a warmhearted landlady of Bath with gentle blue eyes and an enviable talent in taxidermy. Tiny Mrs. Foster, on the other hand, has a soft and rather silly look and shows agitation only when fearing she may miss a train or plane. Hearty Miss Roach is grand fun at country weekends, and her skill at games is evidenced by her large pink face, broad shoulders and bulging calves...
...earlier book, Someone Like Von (TIME, Dec. 28, 1953), Author Dahl specializes in the horror of normality. The eleven lethal short stories in this collection open on the most humdrum level, with neither a piece of furniture nor a part of speech out of place. Gradually, things get askew: the lovable baby begins to look peculiar; the cat sleeping in the sun opens an almost human eye; the corpse in the hospital is not quite as dead as it looks...
...greatest danger facing a writer of this genre is that of tipping his hand too early in the story. Author Dahl perhaps gives the game away in Parson's Pleasure and Genesis and Catastrophe but makes amends in Royal Jelly, where the plot is nobly saved by an ingenious double ending. Some of the others earn high marks: William and Mary features a neat and neatly solved contest between a wife and her dead husband's brain, which lives on in a basin; Georgy Porgy shows how a man can literally lose himself in a woman...
Along with making a reader's skin crawl, Dahl hands out primer instruction in such arts as beekeeping, the poaching of pheasants, Chippendale antiques, and the transmigration of souls. British-born Roald (rhymes with you-all) Dahl is interested in all these matters as well as in good wine, roses and birds (he owns 100 parakeets). Thin, balding and scholarly looking, he is as inconspicuous as one of his own characters. But his work closely resembles that of another British expert in horror, Saki, particularly in casual bloodthirstiness and ghoulish wit, and he very nearly equals Saki in fiendish...
...Journey to the Center of the Earth (from Jules Verne's novel) follows James Mason as he descends into an extinct volcano in Iceland, spends almost a year underground with such companions as Plucky Youth Pat Boone and Beautiful Widow Arlene Dahl, is coughed back up through the crater of Mount Stromboli. A grandly entertaining spoof...