Roald Dahl/Nightmare Fuel

Both Dahl's adult and children's stories have earned a reputation for being very sadistic and often bone chilling creepy and disturbing. This earned him the title "master of the macabre" and also a separate article here on his personal Nightmare Fuel page.

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Adult stories:

• The darkly humourous Lamb to the Slaughter, about a woman who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb. Guess how she disposes of the murder weapon. Come on, guess.
  • You were wrong. She feeds it to the police.
• The Landlady takes place in Bath at a bed and breakfast with an unusually friendly landlady. Later Bill, one of the guests, recognizes the names of two others; we find out that they checked in 2 years ago but never came out. She also has realistic stuffed animals... because they're her old pets. She freely admits to stuffing them herself. Upon which Bill notices that the tea she gave him had a smell and taste of Bitter Almonds. Then she asks if he signed his name to the guestbook, so she can remember it...
  • Subverted- I actually like that story quite a lot. The problem is that you only get it if you know about cyanide.
  • How long can one hope to survive while not knowing about such a thing?
  • Do you know what's really scary? Things disturbingly close to that have really happened.
• Man From the South.
  • Not so much Nightmare Fuel as a distressing insight on how easily people will submit themselves to bodily mutilation if the reward is good enough.
  • I wouldn't have gone for it. I always assume that if somebody offers an apparently absurd bet, they have a trick they're planning on pulling.
    • They made a TV episode out of this for the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents, directed by the master himself. The guy making the bet? Peter Lorre. There is also a version from the 1985 revival of the series, with John Huston in Lorre's role.
• Royal Jelly. A story about a man with a natural affinity for bees who decides to give his sick baby royal jelly to cure her. Except it works too well, and the baby begins to look more like a puffy larva. And the man had been taking royal jelly for months before hand, and is beginning to look more and more like a bee...
• Pig: A local guy who's been living on a farm all his life with his chef aunt, goes to NYC and into a strange restaurant where the chef serves him the special, pork... The chef invites him to a factory tour where he learns the ingredient isn't actually pork... To his horror, it's processed 'human' meat, then he accidentally fall onto the conveyor belt where he is sliced apart. I found it hard to sleep that night
• Your imagination just runs wild after reading Skin, eh? It ends with almost no explanation. Just that the old man's tattoo is being displayed in a museum. And there's no Bristol Hotel in Cannes...
• Go borrow a copy of Sometimes Never: A Fable for Supermen. See if you'd be happy about any information about weapons afterwards.
• Beware of Dog: The short story told from the perspective of the downed British fighter pilot who's in Occupied France the whole time

Children's stories

• The Grand High Witch from The Witches... once she takes off her mask. Especially in the movie. Reiko Kazama watched it, and wanted to be sick once I saw that. DISGUSTING. So much so that I actually wanted to claw my eyes out afterwards.
  • The chapter where Grandma tells about all the children she knew who became victims of witches. Each anecdote is frightening in itself, but then it turns out she herself was once a victim. She refuses to tell what happened to her, but then her grandson asks "Did it have something to with your missing thumb?". This causes Grandma to freeze in shock, thus abruptly breaking off the conversation. The boy then decides to go to bed, wishes her goodnight and the last image he sees of her before going to his room is that she is still sitting in her chair shaking and unable to register what's happening around her. In the next chapter grandma and son are back on speaking terms, but how she exactly lost her thumb remains Shrouded in Myth, causing many young readers' imaginations to go berserk!
  • This book is filled with nightmare fuel, but for this American troper, the worst was when you are told that American witches particularly like turning children into food and getting their parents to eat them. Fifteen years later this troper still gets freaked out by that one.
• The Marvellous Story of Henry Sugar and Six More includes The Swan, in which a little boy is bullied by two larger boys with guns. One of their first acts is to tie him to a train track, thinking that'll kill him. The boy survives, but the story details his feelings and fears as the train rushes over him. The last act of bullying includes cutting the wings off a dead swan, strapping them to the boy's arms, making him climb a tree, telling him to "fly," and then shooting him in the leg when he refuses to jump off.
  • It's not so scary when you realize that he does fly away.
  • Unless he doesn't. Unless it's just metaphorical flying away, meant to symbolize that he has in fact finally died. I still haven't forgiven the person who suggested this possibility to me, but it certainly seems possible.
    • He does survive. The final paragraphs of the story have him crashing sobbing and bloody through the door of his family house, where his Dad promptly calls the authorities...before cutting the severed wings from the harnesses on his son's arms.
  • Not to mention the Henry Sugar story itself, in which Henry gets the ability to see through the backs of cards and promptly uses it to cheat for tons of money. Dahl viciously describes a sequence in which Henry, out of habit, does it to his image in a mirror and sees a blood clot slowly making its inexorable way to his heart, unstoppable and deadly... only to reveal that it was only a potential scenario that didn't actually happen.
    • He doesn't do it out of habit, he does it because he feels "a strange pain in his chest." Which makes it all the more creepier in my opinion.
    • It should be noted that this sequence directly references the heavy implication that Henry's predecessor suffered a Karmic Death as a direct result of using his powers for personal gain; more Nightmare Fuel. Henry avoids this fate by donating his extensive casino winnings to various charities, and making a career out of it (which is the "marvellous" part of the story).
      • It was a charity specifically created (by one of Sugar's associates, at Sugar's behest) as a money sink; he came up with the idea after his first method (throwing the bills into the street) was called stupid by a cop who grew up in an orphanage.
• What makes this all the better was that, in the UK at least, The Marvellous Story Of Henry Sugar collection was calmly pitched as a short-story collection for children. Older children, admittedly, but still...
• The non-friendly giants in the BFG. Especially in the film version, which gives the giants blue skin, horrible voices and slobbery jaws. They were pretty much designed to cause nightmares and lack of sleep in children, particularly because they pray on children while they sleep in their beds.
• The Trunchbull from Matilda - a massive, super-strong, psychotic woman with a horrifically violent temper and an incredible hatred for children, who just so happens to be headmistress of a primary school. Her punishments only add fuel to the fire - lobbing children out of windows, slinging them around by their hair, force feeding them cake, and, worst of all, locking them in a tiny cupboard in her office called the Chokey, which has broken glass and nails sticking out of the walls. The absolute worst part about her though? The children have tried to tell their parents about her before, but what she does is so outrageous that their parents don't believe them!
• Revolting Rhymes:
  • Goldilocks being eaten by the bears
• Dirty Beasts:
  • Crocky-wock the Crocodile who sneaks inside a father and son's house. They hear him downstairs, but are unable to do something in time. So the creature crawls upstairs, enters the room and presumably eats them.
  • The ant eater devouring both the spoiled boy and his aunt. Even though they deserved it...
• Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator:
  • The Vernicious Knids who attack and devour a bunch of unsuspecting visitors to a space hotel. What they exactly do to them is left to the imagination, but back on Earth the President and the White House staff hear what's going on on their radio.
  • The tummy monster. Especially since you have no idea how this creature got inside the fat boy's tummy and how it looks.
    • The original illustrations by Rosemary Fawcett where pretty frightening as well
• The Twits
  • The ending, where Mr. and Mrs. Twit are glued to the ground while standing upside down on their heads. Their fate is disturbing enough, but Dahl adds that due to the pressure of their bodies pushing on their heads they are actually pressed together!!! Their head disappears inside their bodies and their bodies inside their legs until nothing more is left then their clothes.