Let's list all the dodgy stuff in Roald Dahl books

[Keebleman]

The entire action from when Charlie Bucket gets up to go to Wonka's factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the end of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator takes place in a single day.  Not really dodgy I know but I didn't think it was worth starting a thread called "Let's List All The Improbable Stuff in Roald Dahl Books".

[magval]

I mean, remember all the hoo-ha around the JonBenet Ramsay and the Chocolate Factory: Penguin Nonce Classics Edition reissue cover:

What's the craic with this cover?

[phosphoresce]

Mr Twit trying to convince Mrs Twit she has the "shrinks" by sticking bits of wood on to her cane and chair legs, to make her believe she is gradually getting smaller and smaller.

Classic gaslighting.

[idunnosomename]

just a lazy hack shit cover for the 50th anniversary reissue in 2014 to try and make it more adult and ooh sexy. it's from a French magazine shoot in 2008

[samadriel]

I remember reading Bimbo and Topsy (one of the lesser known ones, about a Siamese cat and a Jack Russell) and there's a story where the cat goes up the chimney and no one recognises him because he's all sooty, and the human family go on for ages about how this disgusting hideous savage BLACK thing has got into the house.

Maybe my seven-year-old heart was already bleeding soy-rich snowflake blood but I distinctly remember thinking that seemed a bit suspect.

In one of the Famous Five books (or maybe one of the other groups she did), one of the girls is startled by someone looking in the window one stormy night, and she goes on about "a terrible black face" in the dark or something along those lines. I would've been a similar age to you when I read it, and couldn't quite wrap my head around the notion of a dark face being scarier.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, when the four grandparents become superaged, they can recall back to the early seventeenth century.    Even at age seven I saw what a load of ballcocks that was, when they hadn't lived through those events but been artificially physically aged.

[touchingcloth]

The Giraffe, The Peodo and Me was dodgy.

[shagatha crustie]

The Witches = sexist, dont trust a woman more likely than not she's got blue spit and cleft feet

The BFG = nationalistic, fucking savages from Cuba and the like who won't eat their vegetables, go tell the Queen to get them all strung up from the bottom of copters

Georges Marvellous Medicine - poison your gran, boost your business

[shagatha crustie]

Still all shits on Harry Potter.

[touchingcloth]

I think that people who are fairly good looking - like Roald Dahl - sometimes forget what it is to be ugly and flatter themselves that there's an easy relationship between inner life and the outer face.

I think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of his dodgiest books for this reason. The Oompa Loompas got name checked in the OP, but the whole book is essentially a puritanical treatise on the people - the children - who deserve death based on their lifestyle and physical appearance.

As a spoiled and demanding cunt Veruca Salt is about the only fair game target, but we also have: Augustus Gloop, killed for being fat; Mike Teavee[nb]I always have to remind myself how to spell his surname. Dreadful writing. [/nb], killed for watching too much telly; Violet Beauregarde, killed for chewing gum, the slut.

I realise they aren't actually put to death, but until they reappear at the end of the book that was the impression I was given, but it does come across very grumpy old man, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had secretly murdered children who annoyed him. Maybe he flipped out after seeing Elsie Frost chewing gum.

[kngen]

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator had the Vermicious Knids, which scared the utter shite out of me as a kid, so he can fuck off for that, too.

I have very fond memories of James and the Giant Peach though, and was planning to read it with my own child, but it's going to turn out to be The Turner Diaries with talking animals, isn't it?

[BJBMK2]

I realise they aren't actually put to death, but until they reappear at the end of the book that was the impression I was given, but it does come across very grumpy old man, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had secretly murdered children who annoyed him. Maybe he flipped out after seeing Elsie Frost chewing gum.

Took me a few minutes to realise you were referring to Willy Wonka, NOT Roald Dahl...right?

[touchingcloth]

Took me a few minutes to realise you were referring to Willy Wonka, NOT Roald Dahl...right?

No, I meant Dahl but not in an altogether serious way; I'm only about 85% certain he murdered actual human children in real life.