A collection of the best short stories from a writer with "an ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation" (The New York Times Book Review).

If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with "The Landlady," the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written "Pig," a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in "Man From the South," who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife.

But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own.