Roald Dahl’s Twisted, Overlooked Stories for Adults

I first encountered the work of Roald Dahl in third grade, by playing a character in a classroom adaptation of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Not long after that, I read “James and the Giant Peach.” I was not a child who particularly cared for children’s literature, but even as an eight- or nine-year-old I was captivated by the way Dahl’s fantasias took on their own logic, their own momentum, and were driven as much by the flow of language as by the absurdities of plot. Put another way, reading Dahl was my introduction to the importance of the teller, the idea that a successful story was less a matter of narrative than of voice—or not less, exactly, for Dahl’s writing is nothing if not plotted. But he made me aware that the narrator, whether third person or first, is not a neutral figure but an active, even directive, force. (This discovery may have had something to do with the role I played in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: I was the narrator.)