Roald Dahl (1916—1990) – a British novelist, short story writer, and fighter pilot. Dahl’s children books are known for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters and his short stories for their unexpected endings.
The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it’s a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he’s broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it’s not a joke anymore.
Roald Dahl
Tales of the Unexpected – a collection of short stories first published in 1979. Some short stories, used in this book, that weren’t part of the edition of 1979, was chosen as well for their unexpected endings. All stories demonstrates Dahl’s fascination with horror (with elements of black comedy), which is seen in both his adult fiction and his stories for children.