The dark side of Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was an unpleasant man who wrote macabre books - and yet children around the world adore them. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us, writes Hephzibah Anderson.

Once upon a time a small orphan was packed off to live with his aunts.

They were a sadistic pair, these sisters, and rather than console and nurture they abused and enslaved him, bullying, beating and half-starving him.

But he got his revenge, literally crushing them as he finally escaped, bound for adventure and a better life.

It doesn't sound much like the set-up of a bestselling children's book, but what if I told you that the boy's getaway vehicle was a gargantuan fuzzy-skinned fruit?

James and the Giant Peach sprang from bedtime stories Roald Dahl told his daughters.

He'd already seen modest success with his short stories for adults, twisted tales with grisly punch lines, which were published in magazines such as the New Yorker and Playboy.

This was his first work for children but it left plenty of adult readers deeply disturbed.

Though the book appeared in the US in 1961, Dahl had to wait until 1967 before a British publisher would risk it, and even then, he had to agree to stump up half the costs himself - a savvy-seeming move when the book later became a bestseller.

He followed it with more than 15 other books for children, stories bursting with gluttony and flatulence, in which wives feed their husbands worms and the young are eaten by giants and changed into mice by bald, toeless hags.

Villains loom large; as mean as they are ignorant, they tower over pint-sized protagonists, twirling them around by their pigtails or banishing them to places like 'the Chokey', Miss Trunchbull's nail-studded punishment cupboard.

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