Someone Like You - Roald Dahl

Someone Like You is a compilation of short stories aimed at adults. I’m not quite sure why it’s called Someone Like You, as there’s nothing romantic about them at all – although I think I connect the title with the song by Adele, which doesn’t mean that it should necessarily have anything romantic about it.

In fact, the reverse is the case. These stories all have really horrible twists and subtexts, and they almost make you keep reading even though you really don’t want to know what happens next.

I enjoyed reading the short stories because they weren’t connected with each other (except for the general theme of awfulness) and it was therefore easy to pick up and read a story at a time. However, the one thing I would say is that there were so many stories – and some of them did seem a little repetitive – that by the time I was about 3/4 of the way through I just wanted to have finished them already. That might have had something to do with the fact that I had just got my reading list for Uni and just wanted to start reading them, so I really can’t blame Dahl for that.

Indeed, I can’t really fault his writing. Although he uses a different style to the one he employs in his children’s stories, you can still tell that it’s his voice. The names are often equally amusing as some of his children’s book characters, and the imagination put into each story is very impressive. There were so many stories – and this is only one of a series of collections – and they all had an element which made you cringe in horror or disgust, which really makes the reader admire the talent of the author.

One that sticks in my mind is when a man arrives home (he lives in India) to find his friend with a venomous snake curled up on his stomach under the bed sheets. They spend the story devising ways to remove it without awaking it and letting it bite the friend. The imagery used just made me envision this snake, and I couldn’t help cringing at the thought because it was so horrible! Another was about a man who bet another man his daughter’s hand in marriage, and this second man cheated on the bet. It ended with the first man discovering it, and ended there so we never found out what happened to the daughter!

In fact, this happened a lot in these stories: they deliberately ended just before the story ought to end so that we never found out what happened. It was a very effective ploy, and keeps the stories in your mind much longer than they normally would.