Animals were usually a good sign in a place like this, Billy told himself…it looked to him as though it would be a pretty decent house to stay in. There was a baby-grand piano and a big sofa and several plump armchairs and in one corner he spotted a large parrot in a cage. The room itself, so far as he could see in the half darkness, was filled with pleasant furniture. But the fear that it plays on is, in a sense, timeless. Billy’s story is one that was more common in 1960 than nowadays a commercial traveler roughing it in an unfamiliar town in the provinces. There’s nothing much out of the ordinary so far. Heading for a nearby pub, Billy’s eye is caught by a small sign in a window advertising a bed and breakfast, and so he meets the eponymous landlady. Without knowing a single place or person in the city Billy sets off in search of a place to stay the night. He’s come to Bath for a new job and he’s bought a new navy-blue suit, with a brown Trilby to boot. “Billy Weaver had traveled down from London on the slow afternoon train, with a change at Swindon on the way, and by the time he got to Bath it was about nine o’clock in the evening and the moon was coming up out of a clear starry sky over the houses opposite the station entrance.”īilly is seventeen, gauche, out of his depth and too afraid to show it. Although then again, imagine some of the things that happened to poor Augustus Gloop up there in the marshmallow room. Trust me when I tell you that Roald, though he might be best known for lovable classics like Matilda and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, some of the stuff he did for grown-up readers was pretty wild. I read this about a decade ago, and the creeping sense of unease that Dahl creates as ‘The Landlady’ has stayed with me for a long time. There are editions out there with less scarring illustrations.įor the first week of Halloween I’m talking about ‘The Landlady’, one of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults in his 1960 collection Kiss, Kiss. I’m saving the best till last by the way, so watch this space. They probably won’t be as long as usual, but I suppose brevity is the key element here, and if I went on for as long as I’m accustomed I’d end up spoiling the endings. In honour of both short stories and the month of Halloween I’m going to write a few pieces on some of my favourite horror stories, one for each week of October. It’s also the month of Halloween – and, by extension, the month of horror stories. It’s as good time of year to be reading, is what I mean. The sky’s pewtery, the rain comes in fits and starts, everything’s a bit colder than September and you begin to feel less guilty about sitting indoors with a novel than you did in summer. It’s October now, which for me means the start of the reading weather.
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