Tales of the Unexpected

Sixteen short stories that collected the best of Dahl's adult fiction from Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss, each ending with a twist that turns an ordinary situation into something sinister or absurd. A woman kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and feeds it to the police investigating his murder. A man bets his little finger on a cigarette lighter. A beekeeper feeds his daughter royal jelly with unsettling consequences. Dahl's stories are compact lessons in narrative mechanics — setup, tension, reversal — executed with the same dark precision as his children's books, but without the safety net.