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 distance. It was then that he saw the train. At first it was only a speck, a faraway black dot, but in those few seconds that he kept his head raised, the dot grew bigger and bigger, and it began to take shape, and soon it was no longer a dot but the big, square, blunt front-end of a diesel express.

Peter dropped his head and pressed it down hard into the small hole he had dug for it in the gravel. He swung his feet over to one side. He shut his eyes tight and tried to sink his body into the ground.

The train came over him like an explosion. It was as though a gun had gone off in his head. And with the explosion came a tearing, screaming wind that was like a hurricane blowing down his nostrils and into his lungs. The noise was shattering. The wind choked him. He felt as if he were being eaten alive and swallowed up in the belly of a screaming murderous monster.”

Oof.

Ren Yeah.

Adam It’s a pretty merciless description, he doesn’t pull his punches here.

Ren Yeah. Peter manages to survive being run over by a train, but that’s not enough for Raymond and Ernie —

Adam — Or for Roald Dahl!

Ren Or for Roald Dahl! More torment of this poor boy.

And it’s only after that they we get to the swan of the title, which Ernie shoots and forces Peter retrieve the corpse. And this is what finally makes Peter snap. He’s been very collected and trying to wait it out and hope that they got bored of tormenting him, but he shouts at them, calls them a couple of ignorant idiots and says: “It’s you who ought to be dead instead of the swan! You’re not fit to be alive!”

So that really works Ernie up. He says: ’So you like swans, is that right?’ and he proceeds to cut off the wings of the dead swan, and tie them on to Peter’s arms. Then he makes Peter climb to a top of a tall weeping willow, and tells him he’s going to fly from the top. Peter thinks that he can finally escape them at the top of the tree, but of course, he can’t, and Ernie starts shooting at him with the rifle. So Peter jumps. And this is the end of the story:

"Three different people reported seeing a great white swan circling over the village that morning: a schoolteacher called Emily Mead, a man who was replacing some tiles on the roof of the chemist’s shop whose name was William Eyles, and a boy called John Underwood who was flying his model airplane in a nearby field.

And that morning, Mrs. Watson, who was washing some dishes in her kitchen sink, happened to glance up through the window at the exact moment when something huge and white came flopping down onto the lawn in her back garden. She rushed outside and sank down on her knees beside the small crumpled figure of her son. “Oh, my darling!” she cried, near to hysterics and hardly believing what she saw. “My darling boy! What happened to you?” "My leg hurts,” Peter said, opening his eyes. Then he fainted. "He’s bleeding!” she cried, and she picked him up and carried him inside. Quickly she phoned for the doctor and the ambulance. And while she was waiting for help to come, she fetched a pair of scissors and began cutting the string that held the two great wings of the swan to her son’s arms.”

Adam And Dahl will sometimes do this, take a story that’s been rooted in a kind of heightened mundanity, this kind of everyday nastiness that probably goes further than you expect but is still rooted in mundanity, and then right at the end, like with the child falling into the carpet and possibly disappearing. I wouldn’t call it a twist, exactly, but it’s like the story has followed the logical course of events but then there comes a point when the logic runs out, or is pushed further than logic into a kind of dream or nightmare-like unreality.

Ren I preferred that - I thought it worked better in The Wish than in The Swan.

Adam Why? Why did you think that?

Ren Because I thought that in The Wish it was kind of thematically coherent, with the idea of being a kid and making up a game and then when you’re little the boundaries of what are reality and unreality are less clear, so you make up a game and you’re not sure what you’ve made up and what might be true.

Adam And in a sense it is true, at least for the child. I’ve talked about this before, but Melanie Klein the child psychologist wrote about this really well, the ‘phantasy’, which is what she calls this blurring of fantasy and reality for the small child. It makes me think, in The Wish he’s basically playing The Floor is Lava, and in a sense the floor does become lava for the small child. It’s still rooted in the reality of the room, it’s not just taking place in the child’s head because there’s stuff in the room like the carpet, the carpet’s real.

Did you think that with The Swan that was too sudden a departure, then?

Ren It might just be. I’m quite torn on it actually. It might just be that it’s a very short ending coda that goes it unreality. I like the idea that Peter has been pushed so far that his only escape is into transformation, but I’m not sure that the structure of it quite works.

Adam Yeah, I know what you mean. Because it feels like some kind of psychic or psychotic break, right, but it does also seem to be happening in reality and people are seeing it. It’s not told from Peter’s point of view. But then it does also seem to be a kind of intervention, like grace. Which is weird for Roald Dahl, and I liked that. Because Roald Dahl usually doesn’t reach in to save his characters.

Ren Maybe it was one of the only ways out of this story.

Adam It’s such a bleak story that you kind of think… could he have? It gets so dark that you kind of need that, I guess.

Ren Yeah. I don’t know if we’ve managed to convey just how nasty this story is to read.

Adam Yeah, it’s really hard! Because for one thing, it’s the pacing. It spends a long time with this horrible ordeal, and that’s the sense you have in this story, you just want it to stop! Just stop being so awful to this poor kid!

And I think this story kind of challenges something I read, it’s this article, that I know you read and didn’t wholly agree with, but I found it really interesting. It’s this article by Joyce Carol Oates, that we can link to in the show notes. And she says of the stories, particularly the later stories that: “Intimacy is rejected for distance, sympathy for an Olympian detachment. As if the writer were determined not to overcome to the dangers of over-sensitivity like his victim characters, but to identify with their punitive and sadistic tormentors. As Dahl’s books for children are often fuelled by fantasies of tricks, pranks and revenge in various guises, so what really matters in his mature works is punishment.”

And she relates this to Dahl having been beaten and caned repeatedly at boarding school, and I guess a protective measure as a writer that he has to harden himself to not feel too deeply the suffering that a lot of his characters go through.

I don’t think that’s quite right, because I feel like there is a sympathy here, it’s just that the bullies and tormentors in Dahl’s work are so big, and often physically big, which obviously is an issue in his work and has been picked up recently in these bowdlerised or revised versions of Dahl’s books that have been put out.

But often with Roald Dahl, modern deficits are given a physical form. Monstrous characters generally look monstrous and are often very big or overweight. That’s definitely a common thing in Roald Dahl. And bullies tend to be very large and forceful, and they tend to overshadow everything else. So when I think of Matilda, particularly of the book rather than the film I do think of Miss Trunchbull first and foremost, she towers over that book for me. And in a way that’s sympathetic to the experience of being a child and presumably what Roald Dahl felt being caned as a small boy, of just how massive a headmaster with a cane is.

I was trying to think about the horror in his stories for children and I think, right — you know how we’ve talked about how in a lot of children’s horror stories, going right back to the Demon Headmaster, how adult figures are unreliable and ineffective, basically. In the Demon Headmaster you have the Demon Headmaster himself, and he’s the monstrous figure, but then you have the parents. And the parents are well-meaning, but they’re kind of useless.

But then you also have this tradition of the orphan. And the orphan finds new friends. Like in Harry Potter, yes he doesn’t have parents but he finds new ones. In Roald Dahl you also have that, like in James and the Giant Peach, James is orphaned right at the start. Charlie Bucket has his grandparents, but his granddad’s bed-bound at the start. But I think what’s odd is that sometime these kids really do have to go it alone, and sometimes their new families are really weird, or creepy. Like Willy Wonka as a father figure.

Ren Yeah, the famous ambivalence of Willy Wonka!

Adam Right! You’ve got this guy who’s possibly killing kids, or at the very least doesn’t care too much about their health and safety.

In James and the Giant Peach he becomes friends with a bunch of insects, who are quite strange, to be honest.

Ren I think one of the things that’s so disturbing about The Swan is that the characters Ernie and Raymond have this almost exaggerated cartoonish malevolence of the villains in his children’s books, but the stakes are much higher. It’s like they’ve journeyed from the heightened world of the children’s books into the real world.

Adam Yeah, they’re almost like Fleshlumpeater and Bloodbottler, two of the the giants from the BFG, transformed into teenage boys.

But that is how being bullied feels as a kid. I think one of the things that’s hardest for anyone who’s bullied is, and I’m not alone in this, I’ve talked to other people about it, but when I first got Facebook at university, and then finding kids who bullied me at school trying to add me on Facebook. And to me this was so strange, you were horrible to me! You ruined a lot of my childhood! And it took me quite a while to realise that for them it was malarky. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t serious but for the bullies often they did this because they were bored, or maybe they were unhappy at home and they just kind of did this. But when you’re the victim it can feel massive. And there’s this horrible disconnect between what can feel very casual for the bullies, potentially, and what can be earth-shattering for the victim. And I think this story kind of gets that.

Raymond and Ernie are kind of going through the motions - ‘What’ll we do next?’ ‘Let’s tie him to the train tracks and see if he gets killed.’ There’s a kind of horrible casualness about it, that they have such little moral sense that it doesn’t even occur to them that what they’re doing is appalling, they just do it. And that’s really scary because how can you reason with that?

And I think what’s also disturbing is that Peter has a very canny sense of this. He knows that these two boys can’t be reasoned with, so he just resigns himself for a lot of it.

Ren Yeah, he just has to wait it out until they get bored.

Adam And I feel like that must be how Roald Dahl felt, getting regularly caned at boarding school.

Ren Did you ever read his autobiographies?

Adam I read some of Boy, where he talks about that.

Ren I was really keen on both Boy and Going Solo as a kid, I found them really interesting.

Adam Yeah, my step-son George, they’re probably his two favourite Roald Dahls.

Ren I’m not quite sure what it was — obviously it was describing things that were completely outside of my realm of experience.

Adam Yes, we’ve mentioned before, thankfully neither of us went to boarding school.

Ren Yes. Phew. And crashing his plane in the desert and so on.

Adam There’s some great recordings of Roald Dahl on YouTube, and I feel okay recommending those because he’s dead, and he was a bit of a jerk, frankly.

Ren A lot of a jerk.

Adam Let’s be honest, a lot of a jerk.

Ren He was very anti-Semitic.

Adam Yeah, so I’m not too worried. There’s a guy called Lewis Kirk who seems to have recorded basically every single Roald Dahl story, ever. And they’re all on YouTube. And he’s got a nice voice. So if you’re at all interested, I do recommend those.

Ren Right, so, shall we move on to anything else from the collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar?

Adam Yeah, we’ll talk about the other stories briefly before we get on to the title piece. There’s The Boy Who Talked With Animals, did you read that one?

Ren I did read that one.

Adam What did you think of it?

Ren It was mumbles

Adam It was alright.

Ren It was fine!

Adam It was about a boy who rescues a turtle from a West Indian island, and I think the people from the West Indies are described in pretty unflattering, quite stereotyped tones. The tourists are also quite ugly characters.

Ren Oh yeah, it’s the first story of the collection and it was a bit like ‘Ugh, here we go’.

Adam Yeah, I felt a bit like that too. But the kid rescues the turtle and then goes off with the turtle. I didn’t feel like there was much to it, I was expecting some kind of twist that didn’t really come.

There’s a stronger story called The Mildenhall Treasure —

Ren Yeah, I didn’t read much of this collection. Which is poor form for the podcast. Chalk it down to an envy injury, because I got to the point where Roald Dahl was saying that when he was a young man he used to publish two short stories a year and live off the proceeds, and I had to go and lie down for several weeks.

Adam Yeah, those days are long passed I’m afraid, Ren. Sorry.

This once claims to be based on a real story and an interview with the man who found the Mildenhall Treasure, which seems plausible, and it reads journalistically enough with some embellishments. It’s set in Suffolk, where I’m from, and the flat grey Suffolk landscape is quite well-described. And I think it's a good one for any fans of The Detectorists, if you’re an American listener you probably won’t know, but it’s a really lovely British series set in Suffolk about some metal detectorists trying to find some Anglo-Saxon treasure. It makes lots of good use of the Suffolk landscape and it has Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook in it.

Ren We didn’t watch that together, did we? No, it was later than that.

Adam I only watched it a couple of years ago.

Ren I must have watched it with Ava.

Adam It’s charming, it’s nice.

You also have The Hitchhiker, which is one that I remember from watching Tales of the Unexpected, which was a TV anthology series, like Black Mirror, which were generally adaptations of Roald Dahl stories, introduced by Roald Dahl at the start. And The Hitchhiker is about this foxy man who’s picked up as a hitchhiker and turns out to be a fingersmith, which is a fancy way of saying a pickpocket.

Ren Oh yeah, I did read that one!

Adam And the pickpocketing helps get the protagonist out of some trouble.

Ren Yes, he has incredibly fast fingers.

Adam It’s a pretty light, fairly charming story, not a whole lot to it. There’s Lucky Break, which is an autobiographical account of how Dahl became a writer, which is fairly interesting if you are familiar with his work, and that’s followed last in the collection by A Piece of Cake, which is his first published story and it’s about him being shot down as a pilot. And it actually goes into this strange dream-like reverie after he’s been shot down, which is genuinely quite hallucinatory. I can see how Joyce Carol Oates talks about how his style becomes more detached, because this feels very sensory and embedded in the experience of the pilot. It’s mostly a descriptive piece, there’s not much of a story to it, but it’s a pretty remarkable piece of description.

And one nice thing, in a Piece of Cake he talks about how his children’s book ideas come about and he says he has this much-worn, red-covered volume in which he jots down ideas, sometimes when he wakes in the night on the side of his bed. And it’s remarkable how simple the ideas behind some of his stories are. He said he wrote down: “What about a chocolate factory that makes marvellous things, with a crazy man running it? - This became Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Ren Yep!

Adam And there’s another one, for Henry Sugar, which we’ll go onto now: ‘A man acquires the ability to see through playing cards. He makes millions at casinos’. That’s it! This became Henry Sugar.

But he extends it with Henry Sugar to novella length, it’s easily the longest in the collection.

Ren Yeah, it’s pretty long! And it’s him deliberately not writing a horror story, or a grisly story, because he’s been accused of writing too many horrible stories, apparently. Which is a fair accusation.

This story is about an idle rich son of a wealthy father, living out his days in gambling and games, who one day comes across a pamphlet called ‘A report on an interview with Imhrat Khan, a man who can see without eyes’. And this pamphlet goes on to detail how Imhrat Khan gained advanced Yogi powers that enabled him to, as it says, see without using his eyes. And Henry is blown away by this and the implications for his gambling, and devotes himself for years to learning these techniques.

But the interesting thing about this story is that it seems as if it’s going to have a comeuppance or a grisly ending, but it doesn’t. But Dahl in fact can’t resist writing the grisly ending, and presenting it to the reader as what would happen ‘if this was a story’, rather than the truth.

Adam As an alternative ending, like, 'if I was going to write a horrible ending, this is what it would be like’.

Ren I think it’s worth reading.

Adam Oh, please do. And actually when I mentioned this collection to Antonia I said, ‘it’s not really horror’, and she said, ‘Oh actually there’s a bit of body horror,’ and I think it must have been this bit she was referring to.

Ren "Now, had this been a made-up story instead of a true one, it would have been necessary to invent some sort of a surprising and exciting end for it. It would not be difficult to do that. Something dramatic and unusual. So before telling you what really did happen to Henry in real life, let us pause here for a moment to see what a competent fiction writer would have done to wrap this story up. His notes would read something like this:

1. Henry must die. Like Imhrat Khan before him, he had violated the code of the yogi and had used his powers for personal gain.

2. It will be best if he dies in some unusual and interesting manner that will surprise the reader.

3. For example, he could go home to his flat and start counting his money and gloating over it. While doing this, he might suddenly begin to feel unwell. He has a pain in his chest.

4. He becomes frightened. He decides to go to bed immediately and rest. He takes off his clothes.He walks naked to the cupboard to get his pyjamas. He passes the full-length mirror that stands against the wall. He stops. He stares at the reflection of his naked self in the mirror. Automatically, from force of habit he begins to concentrate. And then. . .

5. All at once, he is "seeing through" his own skin. He "sees through" it in the same way that he "saw through" those playing-cards a while back. It is like an X-ray picture, only far better. An X-ray can see only the bones and the very dense areas. Henry can see everything. He sees his arteries and vein with the blood pumping through him. He can see his liver, his kidneys, his intestines and he can see his heart beating.

6. He looks at the place in his chest where the pain is coming from. . . and he sees. . . or thinks he sees. . . a small dark lump inside the big vein leading into the heart on the right-hand side. What could a small dark lump be doing inside the vein? It must be a blockage of some kind. It must be a clot. A blood-clot!

7. At first, the clot seems to be stationary. Then it moves. The movement is very slight, no more than a millimetre or two. The blood inside the vein is pumping up behind the clot and pushing past it and the clot moves again. It jerks forward about half an inch. This time, up the vein, towards the heart. Henry watches in terror. He knows, as almost everyone else in the world knows, that a blood-clot which has broken free and is travelling in a vein will ultimately reach the heart. If the clot is a large one, it will stick in the heart and you will probably die. . .

That wouldn't be such a bad ending for a work of fiction, but this story is not fiction. It is true. The only untrue things about it are Henry's name and the name of the gambling casino. Henry's name was not Henry Sugar. His name has to be protected. It still must be protected. And for obvious reasons, one cannot call the casino by its real name. Apart from that, it is a true story. And because it is a tiue story, it must have the true ending. The true one may not be quite so dramatic or spooky as a made-up one could be, but it is nonetheless interesting. Here is what actually happened.”

Adam That’s definitely our (booming sound effect) Claim Of The Week. I should coco, true story indeed.

Ren And what ‘actually happened’ is that Henry becomes a philanthropist, employed a Hollywood makeup artist so he could visit casinos in expert disguise, and using his winnings to build orphanages.

Adam This is the title story that Wes Anderson has been adapting, or is in the process of adapting for a short Netflix series. And that makes perfect sense to me, if you think about The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited or other Wes Anderson films, he loves the idle rich. And you can totally see why the character of Henry Sugar would appeal to Wes Anderson.

Ren I feel like he enjoys a story-within-a-story, too.

Adam He does like these nested stories, absolutely. And even though The Darjeeling Limited is possibly his weakest film, it does show that has some interest in India.

Ren Yeah, doesn’t The Grand Budapest Hotel have something?

Adam Yeah, it has elements. I like that one, actually. I like the model work, it’s very dinky. But you can see him enjoying this story and the idea of a plan that works through and then goes in a slightly different whimsical direction to what you might expect. But I was wondering - what else? There was some confusion actually, I saw online this week a website run with the headline that Wes Anderson’s Netflix film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is ‘just 37 minutes long’. And then he clarified that that’s just the title story, because there’s the confusion is that the name of the story is the same as the collection.

But my understanding is that that is the first episode of four, which means that there’s three more adaptations from this book.

Ren Okay…

Adam Now, I don’t think Wes Anderson is going to adapt The Swan. It’s very strange to think of The Swan, a story about a boy being horribly, relentlessly bullied, in Wes Anderson’s pastel coloured, symmetrically framed, picture-perfect style.

Ren I can’t imagine it — it’s too grubby, it’s too nasty.

Adam It would be really weird if he does it. Using very delicate model work to depict a swan’s wings —

Ren I can see the image of the train coming towards the boy on the train tracks, maybe.

Adam Adventurous music on the soundtrack, maybe.

Ren But it’d be an odd fit.

Adam I kind of hope he does it, because it would be really weird. I think it’s much more likely that he’s going to be adapting The Hitchhiker, because Royal Tenenbaums has a conman and he likes these kind of amoral but genial, charismatic crooks, basically. So I think The Hitchhiker he’ll do. The Boy Who Talked With Animals doesn’t have a lot to it, I think, so I’m not sure it’d make a great adaptation, but we know from The Life Aquatic that he does like aquatic creatures, and that one has the underwater creatures animated by Henry Selick.

Ren Ooh yeah, you could get some good turtle animations.

Adam Exactly. It would be nice if he collaborated with Sellick again for that. And then I’m not sure, maybe The Mildenhall Treasure. I’d love to see him set something in Suffolk, although obviously when he did Fantastic Mr Fox it was a very American adaptation of Roald Dahl. But I’m not sure, I do wonder if one of the other stories will be autobiographical about Roald Dahl and might include bits from Boy.

Ren Yeah, I think bits from Boy could definitely work.

Adam Because as you said, he does like stories-within-stories so I could imagine that he might have someone playing Dahl narrating Henry Sugar that then has another story within it. So he might do it like that.

I am looking forward to it, despite some of my reservations about Roald Dahl. I don’t want to talk too much about it because I don’t want to wade into culture war stuff particularly, but I do think this whole business with Penguin releasing these newly-edited versions that have been read by sensitivity readers. Someone else said this to me and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a cynical ploy to attract media attention and criticism because of the rights being sold to Netflix. I know that’s really cynical —

Ren But it is really catnip for culture warrior sorts.

Adam And to be honest I am with Joyce Carol Oates on this. Joyce Carol Oates’ tweets are a mixed bag. She’s quite notorious for some really terrible tweets — have you seen her tweets about skeletons?

Ren No!

Adam It’s so funny, it’s amazing. Okay, so, Joyce Carol Oates for those who don’t know, is a very prolific American novelist. I actually like some of her novels very much, Them particularly. She’s a very skilled writer but she’s very elderly now, she’s in her ‘80s, and she’s said some problematic things but also just some odd things.

Ren I think she did also come out swinging against transphobia recently.

Adam She can be pretty great! But she gets really angry about people having skeletons in their windows at Halloween.

Ren (laughs)

Adam Seriously! Every Halloween she posts angrily on Twitter about how these people don’t respect death.

Ren (gasps at the hot take) Wow…

Adam She posts angry photos of photos she’s taken in her neighbourhood of people with happy skeletons in their windows, and shames them for it.

Ren Amazing. What a hill to die on.

Adam Okay, so Joyce Carol Oates has written books based on actual murder cases, right? Books that use real death for stories. Actual tragedies. Quite a lot of times. If I’m honest, and I like her writing, but I’d say that Joyce Carol Oates sometimes has a tendency to exploit death. But. Apparently the real sick men, or children, in this so-called society, are not those who exploit the deaths of celebrities or the suffering of Marilyn Monroe, it’s people who put funnybones style skeletons in their windows at Halloween.

Ren They must be stopped.

Adam So yeah, it’s quite funny.

Ren I think you were talking about her for a reason other than skeletons, though!

Adam Oh right, sorry! Yes, she made a point that you can’t really make Roald Dahl not offensive. She basically said, to be honest, you can’t really make Roald Dahl stories not offensive. They’re just pretty nasty, and even if you replace the language, they’re still pretty nasty.

And I totally understand why some parents wouldn’t buy their kids Roald Dahl, to be honest. Some of it is really outdated. And he’s got his strengths as a writer, but if you take something like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory —

Ren — And the version of that we read as children was already the edited version because the original version was too offensive.

Adam Oh yes, the original version was too racist.

Ren The original version was too racist, and I need to remind people of this every time because I read the original version as a kid.

Adam Oh my god. But this is a story where Dahl basically punishes children for their sins, one of which is eating too much. And you can say that Augustus Gloop isn’t fat, or call him something different, but he is still definitely being punished for eating too much. And I can understand if you’re like ‘eh, that’s not a very good message’, I can understand choosing not to read that to your kids. But he has his strength, and there are some actually nice stories. I really liked The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me, as a kid. Which is probably his gentlest one.

Ren Yeah, that one’s sweet. Esio Trot.

Adam Yes, Esio Trot is nice. And then there's his stories for adults, and I want to talk about some of them because we started with The Wish. I haven’t read many of them. Some of them are just really unpleasant and misogynist. But some of them have stayed with me since childhood. Lamb to the Slaughter I studied in secondary school, in year 7 or 8, and I have a memory of us watching one of the TV adaptations of it.

There’s been a couple of TV adaptations, the Alfred Hitchcock presents one as well as Tales from the Unexpected.

Ren You linked that to me, the Hitchcock one, so I watched that.

Which is about a doting wife whose policeman husband comes home from work and tells her that he’s going to leave her. And in response, she clubs him to death with a frozen leg of lamb. And then when his police officer colleagues come over to investigate this murder she’s reported, she serves them the murder weapon for dinner as they puzzle over the mystery of who killed him. And it’s the perfect crime!

Adam I do remember, not that I had any intention of murdering anyone with a leg of lamb as a kid, I didn’t like the taste of lamb, for one thing. But as an adult reading this I was thinking ‘Hm, I don’t know if this is that good a crime, really. There would be fingerprints’, I’m too cynical. But as a kid I totally bought it, I was like ‘Wow, that is the perfect crime!’. It’s a really simple twist.

Ren But it’s kind of great.

Adam It’s kind of great.

Ren And she does this deranged giggle at the end as she gets away with it.

Adam That’s the thing with Roald Dahl, he will let people get away with it. Maybe it’s a bit of an overreaction, her killing him, but she does sort of does it without thinking about it. The next thing she knows she’s just clubbed him to death. And in life people do get away with murder, who knows how often, we wouldn’t know! However many true crime podcasters find out years later, there’s always going to be more than the true crime podcasters manage to discover.

Ren Don’t say that, Adam, you’ll just encourage them.

Adam Yeah, get another hobby. Become a detectorist. There are better ways to get famous and make money.

But that’s a neat little story, and my favourite, and probably one of my favourite things that Roald Dahl ever wrote is the final story we’re going to cover, which is called Royal Jelly.

Ren Yeah, do you want to do Texture of the Week first?

Adam I don’t know, because my Texture of the Week might be a bit of a spoiler for Royal Jelly.

Ren Okay, let’s just go straight into Royal Jelly, then and do Texture of the Week at the end.

Yes, it’s definitely my favourite of these stories we’ve looked at.

Adam Yep, rightly so. I’m glad our tastes align.

Ren And probably the most children’s horror too.

Adam Yeah.

Ren Royal Jelly concerns a worried and exhausted mother, Mabel, whose six-week old daughter is refusing to feed, and whose husband, Albert is just telling her not to worry.

He’s an avid beekeeper, and he settles down with his latest bee magazine to distract himself from his fretsome wife, and he begins to read an article on Royal Jelly.

This article explains the process by which the royal jelly is fed to the larvae who are destined to become queens, and it gives the analogy that the amount of royal jelly they’re fed, ‘this is as if a seven and a half pound baby should increase to five tons in five days’, and from reading this line inspiration strikes. He calls for Mabel but she’s too exhausted to respond, so he just says he’ll take care of the next feeds. And he begins to mix the royal jelly into the milk as he’s preparing it.

And, lo and behold, once he’s mixed the royal jelly into her feed, the baby takes to it right away, and starts to look plumper and healthier immediately. Mabel is overjoyed, and it’s only the next evening that she remembers that Albert wanted to tell her something. After much teasing, she gets it out of him that he’s feeding the baby royal jelly.

She’s outraged, and even Albert’s lengthy explanation of royal jelly, and how he has converted his hives to producing it, does little to mollify her. But she does notice, during his explanation of his royal jelly making and beekeeping, that her husband is starting to look a bit like a bee himself.

They realise that they’ve been talking so long that they’ve overrun on feeding the baby, and again Albert prepares the milk, and again the baby sucks it all down, and then wails for more. They give her extra milk and she drinks it all up, and Mabel says ‘I assume there wasn’t any royal jelly in this last feed we’ve given her’, but of course there was.

Albert goes to pick up the baby, and he marvels at how big and round she’s got, and when they go and lay her down to change her, they see that it’s only her abdomen that’s grown big and round, her limbs are still thin, and there’s a trail of fuzz growing along her belly. It’s only then that Albert admits to Mabel that he’s been feeding himself royal jelly for the past year.

Do you want to read the ending of this?

Adam Yes, well it is my Texture of the Week, so we should do a little jingle. I’ll get my rattle.

Adam and Ren (rattling, buzzing) Bzzzz Texture! Texture! Texture of the weeeek!

Adam So in the Tales of the Unexpected episode, the actor playing the beekeeper starts getting this horrible bristling downy fuzz on his arms, poking out from under his cuffs. And so it goes in the story.

"The very first time I ever read that sentence, I just jumped straight out of my chair and I said to myself if it’ll work with a lousy rat, I said, then there’s no reason on earth why it shouldn’t work with Albert Taylor.’

He paused again, craning his head forward and turning one ear slightly in his wife’s direction, waiting for her to say something. But she didn’t.

‘And here’s another thing.’ He went on. It made me feel so absolutely marvellous, Mabel, and so sort of completely different to what I was before that I went right on taking it even after you’d announced the joyful tidings. Buckets of it I must have swallowed during the last 12 months.’

The big heavy haunted-looking eyes of the woman were moving intently over the man’s face and neck. There was no skin showing at all on the neck, not even at the sides below the ears. The whole of it, to a point where it disappeared into the collar of the shirt, was covered all the way round with those shortish hairs, yellowy black.

‘Mind you,’ he said, turning away from her, gazing lovingly now at the baby, ‘it’s going to work far better on a tiny infant than on a fully developed man like me. You’ve only got to look at her to see that, don’t you agree?’

The woman’s eyes travelled slowly downward and settled on the baby. The baby was lying naked on the table, fat and white and comatose, like some gigantic grub that was approaching the end of its larval life and would soon emerge into the world complete with mandibles and wings.’

And thus bee baby was born!*

Ren Oh, you missed the last line!

Adam What’s the last line?

Ren “‘Why don’t you cover it up, Mabel?’ he said. ‘We don’t want our little queen to catch a cold.’”

Yeahhh! Yeah. Good stuff.

Adam Yeah, that is good. Roald Dahl should have written more about bee babies.

Ren Yeah, love a bee baby.

Adam So yes, any last thoughts?

Ren Um… no.

Adam It’s a bit of a hodge-podge of a collection, to be honest.

Ren Do you think there’s any further Tales of the Unexpected ones we should do?

Adam I don’t know, I think we’ve done the ones that are relevant. And some of them aren’t really appropriate for kids, they’re a bit skeezy, or a bit low brow, perhaps. There is perhaps some more Roald Dahl to do, I think we should do Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

Ren Urgghg, yeah, we should.

Adam Especially if there’s a film adaptation.

Ren Oh god.

Adam Which I hope there will be, with all these Netflix adaptations.

Ren That book is so upsetting.

Adam Yeah! What I’d really like is for Henry Sellick to do it. That would be amazing. And I would like to do the BFG at some point, particularly the old animated version. I haven’t seen the new Spielberg version.

Ren No, me neither.

Adam I know a lot of people talk about the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as children’s horror, but if I’m honest I think it’s really only the boat ride.

Ren Yeah…

Adam I mean, the boat ride is properly creepy. It really is!

Ren It really is!

Adam But I don’t think the rest of the film is, personally.

Ren Hmm, yeah… it might just be Gene Wilder being a little weird goblin.

Adam Yeah, I think it’s mostly his performance. Which is why the Tim Burton version didn’t really work for me, because you’ve got Johnny Depp doing a Micheal Jackson impression. Which is just —

Ren Less appealing.

Adam Well, yeah. I don’t think he really thought it through. I think he just thought it would be a neat idea and then went with it, but just because something’s a neat idea doesn’t mean it’ll actually work.

Ren Yep.

Adam I don’t know, I get a bit sad because I love early Tim Burton films so much. I’ve been getting to do a bit of Film Studies with the support centre at the school, so these are kids who are struggling to access mainstream education for one reason or another, and I’ve been given permission to do a bit of Film Studies with them in case they want to do it at GCSE. And I’ve basically indulged myself, if I’m honest, so I’ve done Coraline and PeeWee’s Big Adventure, which is Tim Burton’s first feature film, and I love it so much.

I really do love early Burton films but then it gets to Sleepy Hollow and I feel the wheels start to come off. And then you get films like Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I remember seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the cinema and being so disappointed. I’ve come round to it a little, I’ve seen it since and it has some interesting things in it.

Have you seen any of Wednesday? Because I haven't.

Ren I haven’t, but Ava was potentially intersted in doing it for the podcast.

Adam We probably should, and maybe it would rekindle my love for Burton.

Ren I have something to plug this episode!

Adam Oh my gosh, yes, and it’s really good as well!

Ren Actually relevant! I have a short story in the third issue of an anthology called Archive of the Odd, which is a horror and other fantasy stories told in unusual formats, such as a course syllabus, or a doctor’s chart, or a contract, you know, things that aren’t prose.

Adam Or for you, a series of Amazon review.

Ren In my case, a series of Amazon reviews. And it’s just come out and it’s a very lovingly laid-out PDF by the editors, they’ve put a lot of effort into the layouts and illustrations and I really recommend it! Not just because I’m in it, it’s just really good.

Adam I bought it, and I’ve only read Ren’s story so far, I’m going to read more, but Ren’s story was really wonderful, I genuinely really enjoyed it so I recommend it.

Ren Thank you, Adam!

So, thanks for listening… um, you can email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com, if you want to recommend things that we cover, like Dave did, and then we did cover it eventually.

Adam How long did it take us, Ren?

Ren Ehhh, we don’t need to talk about that, it’s fine.

Adam Does Dave still listen, do you know?

Ren His suggestion was the Grinny, and he said he listened to it. So if you want to be like Dave then you can email us and suggest things.

We are technically still on Twitter, @stillscaredpod, got to be honest, I don’t go on it very often.

Adam Well, good for you. I’m not on it either.

Ren I post when we have a new episode but I can’t really handle much Twitter.

Adam I’m just on Discord talking about hororr games with the cool kids.

Ren I’m on BeReal!

Adam What’s even that?!

Ren Oh, I love BeReal! It’s the best social media! It prompts you to take a photo at a different time each day, and it takes two photos, one with the front camera and one with the back camera, so you get a selfie and whatever you’re doing at the time.

Adam Is it related to bees?

Ren No, sorry.

Adam Aw, I thought maybe because of the Royal Jelly story.

Ren Sorry.

Adam So, anyway, Joe…

Ren Yeah, yeah, our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, our outro is by Joe Kelly, our artwork is by Letty Wilson, and I’ll put all of their details in the show notes.

Do you have a sign off for us, Adam?

Adam Yeah, be like Dave and eat royal jelly, creepy kids!

Ren Catch you next time!

Adam Bye!

Ren Bye!

(Outro music plays)

• I realised when transcribing this that I never gave my Texture of the Week! It was this description from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which Imhrat Kahn is having his eyes bandaged by doctors to prove that he can see without using them. “Dr Marshall came in with a basin of dough. It was the ordinary white dough used for baking bread. It was nice and soft. I took a lump of the dough and plastered it over one of the Indian's eyes. I filled the whole socket and let the dough overlap on to the surrounding skin. Then I pressed the edges down hard. I did the same with the other eye."