In this episode we talked about the short story collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl, as well as other Dahl short stories including The Wish, Lamb to the Slaughter and Royal Jelly.

Sound credits:
Train, fast, heavy, squeals, breaks.wav by golovlev.sound
Swarm of bees by Globofonia
Heartbeat by Niedec

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

And! Ren has a short story in Archive of the Odd Issue 3, a horror zine of unusual formats. There are various options to buy digital copies here.

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about a selection of short stories by Roald Dahl. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Adam “There was this deep curling river of black that ran clear across the width of the carpet, and he was forced by his position to cross it at its widest part. He thought first of trying to jump it, but decided he couldn't be sure of landing accurately on the narrow band of yellow on the other side. He took a deep breath, lifted one foot, and inch by inch he pushed it out in front of him, far far out, then down and down until at last the tip of his sandal was across and resting safely on the edge of the yellow. He leaned forward, transferring his weight to his front foot. Then he tried to bring the back foot up as well. He strained and pulled and jerked his body, but the legs were too wide apart and he couldn't make it. He tried to get back again. He couldn't do that either.

He was doing the splits and he was properly stuck. He glanced down and saw this deep curling river of black underneath him. Parts of it were stirring now, and
uncoiling and beginning to shine with a dreadfully oily glister. He wobbled, waved his arms frantically to keep his balance, but that seemed to make it worse. He was starting to go over. He was going over to the right, quite slowly he was going over, then faster and faster, and at the last moment, instinctively he put out a hand
to break the fall and the next thing he saw was this bare hand of his going right into the middle of a great glistening mass of black and he gave one piercing cry as it touched.

Outside in the sunshine, far away behind the house, the mother was looking for her son.”

Hello Ren!

Ren Hi Adam! Thank you for your excellent reading of The Wish by Roald Dahl.

Adam Yes, and today we’re focusing on a little menagerie of stories by Roald Dahl focussing on his collection ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More’. Which doesn’t include The Wish, but it’s one of his short stories that features a child protagonist. And the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar collection was aimed at slightly older readers, my copy belongs to the Puffin Teenage Fiction imprint. Do you have the same edition? I have Henry Sugar looking very toothsome and nose-pronounced leaning over his balcony and throwing money to the assembled people below.

Ren No, I had a different one. Although I have currently mislaid it, chaotically. Don’t know where my copy has gone.

Adam Do you remember what it had on the cover?

Ren I think it was a collection of objects?

Adam I mean, that sounds like what you've lost it among.

Ren Yeah. I think there were some dice. I’m looking on Google to see if I can find the copy that I have.

Adam If it was objects from the stories it might have a turtle?

Ren I think it was cards and dice?

Adam Okay, so that might relate to The Hitchhiker? Oh no, actually that could relate to Henry Sugar.

Ren Yeah, gambling-related paraphernalia.

Adam There’s a story called A Piece of Cake that doesn’t actually feature Bruce Bogtrotter’s famous chocolate cake. There’s also The Hitchhiker which doesn’t have many objects in, but it does have a classic car.

Ren Ah, okay. My copy does have a classic car on the cover, two dice and an ace of spades. And some writing in the background.

Adam Ooh and, you, listeners! Sorry, I'm not trying to point at your ears. If you’re listening expecting a discussion of Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, that’s yet to be released, but near the ending of the episode we will make predictions, probably very canny and accurate predictions, I would assume, about Wes Anderson’s upcoming adaptation of this book.

Well, of the title story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and three of the stories within. There are seven stories in the collection, so we’re going to guess which three they might be. Some of these stories are a lot more horrible than others, and this is a children’s horror podcast, so we’re going to be focussing on the more macabre side of Roald Dahl’s writing.

Ren And this was a listener suggestion, it was Dave, again, thank you Dave! He specifically mentioned in his email the story The Swan as the one that struck him as the most horrible, and that’s the one that we picked out too. The story described by one Goodreads reviewer as ‘A piece of sadistic filth’.

Adam Which is not wholly characteristic. Mostly this is a quite whimsical collection, I would say. They’re flights of fancy with elements of grotesqueries, which is normally how I’d think of Roald Dahl’s writing for children, something like James and the Giant Peach, or even The Witches. We’ve discussed The Witches on the podcast before, and The Witches has a lot of frightening bits, I couldn’t even cope with having the book in my bedroom as a kid, I had to move it out of the bedroom to sleep.

But on re-reading it, there is quite a lot of mouse antics. Once the kids get turned into mice they have a pretty jolly time of it, there’s a mouse tightrope and so on. There’s some horrible stuff in there but there’s also a lot of whimsy.

The Swan, however, is not a very whimsical tale, I think it’s fair to say. Do you want to do a basic outline of the plot?

Ren Well, I’ve got a pretty extended recap of the plot, but you can interject as we go on.

The Swan starts with a boy called Ernie who gets given a 22. calibre rifle for his birthday, and told by his father to bring back a rabbit for supper. Ernie is a ‘big lout of a boy’, a real wrong-un as Dahl is at pains to point out, with a father who’s a truck driver, so what do you expect, is the implication that Dahl is putting across.

Adam Yeah, he’s definitely characterised as a working class oink.

Ren Oink. Yeah. He meets up with his equally loutish friend Raymond, for an afternoon of shooting innocent creatures. After they’ve shot various birds, they come across Peter Watson —

Adam And the bird shooting did remind me of The Magic Finger, which is a lesser-known Roald Dahl.

Ren Another unsettling one, that.

Adam Yeah, not quite horror but definitely unsettling. In which a family who love to hunt are transformed into wild fowl, possibly ducks, and shot at. And I think reading this story you expect that there might be some kind of turning the tables or justice coming down the road for these two young bully-boys, but we’ll see what happens.

Ren Yeah. Well, Peter Watson is a small bespectacled sensitive boy, whose father ‘did not drive a truck or work in a factory. He worked at the bank.’ There’s not a lot of subtlety going on in this story, I think it’s fair to say.

So Ernie and Raymond torment Peter, to the extent of tying him to the railway tracks in the path of an oncoming train.

Adam And this is a lot less whimsical than it was in those silent films! Back then it was a lark, but in this story it seems quite unpleasant! And it really ratchets up the tension. This is quite a slow section of the story, and what I really like about this is there’s quite a lot of internal narration discussing how Peter feels as he’s tied to the tracks. And he realises quite quickly that Raymond and Ernie aren’t joking around, they’re quite willing to see him run over and killed by a train. Can I read the section?

Ren Please.

Adam So it describes him for this agonising few paragraphs just lying there and watching the clouds, trying to distract himself as he’s waiting for the train to come.

"And then, quite suddenly, he heard a curious little vibrating sound coming from the rails on either side of him. It was very soft, this sound, scarcely audible, a tiny little humming, thrumming whisper that seemed to be coming along the rails from far away.

That’s a train, he told himself.

The vibrating along the rails grew louder, then louder still. He raised his head and looked down the long and absolutely straight railway line that stretched away for a mile or more in the di