In Rough Country by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

was charred on the outside, but I knew it was bound to be sweet and tender inside. So I took him home…and told [Sundstrom] to come along for dinner. I heated the toddler up and put him on a platter and garnished him with parsley…and you never saw a tastier dish in your life…. And what do you think he did after all the trouble I’d gone to? Refused to eat any of it, the sentimentalist! And he called me a cannibal!
    Is the story authentic? Is it a grotesque tall tale, meant to tease Captain Sundstrom’s genteel guests? In the shocked aftermath of the narration, one of the guests throws a glass onto the stone floor of the terrace where it “exploded like a shot”—an enigmatic response that, ironically, summons the native kitchen boyto the scene. Stafford’s contempt for the gathering, as for the privileged white class to which they belong, is perfectly evoked: “[The kitchen boy] ran, cringing, sidewise like a land crab, and the Captain, seeing him, hollered, “Now, damn you, what do you want? Have you been eavesdropping?”

THE ART OF VENGEANCE: ROALD DAHL
    Collected Stories
by Roald Dahl,
with an introduction by
Jeremy Treglown
    B orn in Llandaff, Wales, of well-to-do Norwegian parents, educated in England and a pilot with the Royal Air Force for part of the Second World War, Roald Dahl (1916–1990) is the author of numerous books for children 1 and a relatively small but distinct body of prose fiction for adults, Over to You (1946), Someone Like You (1953), Kiss Kiss (1960), Selected Stories (1970), Switch Bitch (1974), and Eight Short Stories (1987). The Collected Stories , with an excellent introduction by Dahl’s biographer Jeremy Treglown, is a gathering of forty-eight stories of considerable diversity, ambition, and quality, with settings ranging from Kenya to rural England, London, and New York City and narrative styles ranging from realistic to the fabulist and surreal. Though a number of Dahl’s most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, Dahl’s reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongst, like artful variants of the Grimms’ fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H. H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, MurielSpark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled “My Lady Love, My Dove”: “I’m a nasty person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That’s why we get along together.” Given Dahl’s predilection for severely punishing his fictional characters, you might expect this nasty lady to be punished, but Roald Dahl is not a writer to satisfy expectations.
    Though in his fiction for adults as in his books for children Dahl exhibits the flair of a natural storyteller, for whom no bizarre leap of the imagination is unlikely, he seems to have begun writing, at the urging of C. S. Forester, as a consequence of his wartime experiences in the RAF, which included crash-landing in the African desert and participating in highly dangerous air battles during the German invasion of Greece. Such early stories as “An African Story,” “Only This,” “Someone Like You,” and “Death of an Old Old Man” draw memorably upon these experiences and suggest that, if Dahl had not concentrated on the short-story form, and more or less abandoned realism for the showy detonations of plot made popular in Dahl’s youth by Saki and O. Henry, who both published first collections of stories in the early 1900s, he might have developed into a very different sort of writer altogether. The first story in this volume, “An African Story,” is a tale of primitive revenge recounted in the most laconic of voices, as chilling as any of Paul Bowles’s