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Study 025 - Lamb to the Slaughter (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-06 03:37:10
Imported:
2026-06
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Happy New Year! We're back with the Roald Dahl crime classic Lamb to the Slaughter!

Special thanks to our reader: Heather Klinke!

Next up - Another creepy Dahl: The Landlady 

Comments

Nic Wassell

I think that keeping the reason for him leaving her also works to avoid any sympathy for him that might ruin the enjoyment of her getting away with it. If the reason was more along the lines of "I'm gay and I can't live a lie anymore" or "I found your diary and can't believe you wanted the Nazis to win!", you wouldn't be as readily on her side. Even the probable insinuation of an affair can be sympathised with on a 'is it crueler to leave now or live with someone you don't love for another twenty years' basis. By making it unsaid, it negates all that and doesn't get in the way of watching her revenge unfold.

James Duffy

I studied this while at secondary school in the 90s, in the UK. Always remembered it.

Aidan McSweeney

I was so hungry for that lamb roast while reading this story

Clownf1st

I think he rejected her when he discovered that she'd smothered her parents to death with a side of beef

Billy Launder

A friend got me into Dahl's short stories when I was 11 years old. I'd always found his children's stories too disturbing as they never acknowledged the horror that was front and centre of The Witches, The Twits, George's Marvelous Medicine. Bludgeoning someone to death with a frozen leg of lamb was fairly tame in comparison, I thought. I really hope you guys check out The Sound Machine, which is Dahl's stab at cosmic horror.

Jamie Brittain

I would say that rather than being an 'undercurrent' of cruelty in Dahl's work, there is very much an 'overcurrent', or tidal wave - they are completely obsessed with it. His books are almost universally focussed around sadism in one form or other (Charlie and The Chocolate being a - mostly - warm hearted outlier, though not for Mike, Augustus and Violet et al). As a child, this is what set his books apart from almost every other back then, the absolute fixation on drawn out pain and suffering inflicted by adults on children, which is then ultimately reversed on the perpetrators. George's Marvellous Medicene, where George gradually collects various ingredients with which to poison his awful grandmother has a kind of brutal sense of inevitable retribution which reminds me nothing more of some lost Michael Haneke movie. Just delicious food for the deranged, hungry minds of little kids. I am not sure which of his stories I would read to my children - perhaps none, as many of them have a bleak heart I can't quite bring myself to expose them to, plus a fair bit of racism (he was an awful anti-semite too). That said, his basic aesthetic is now pretty universal in the kids book industry in a much less interesting form - the depressingly popular books of hateful British tv vampire David Walliams, with their illustrations by Dahl collaborator Quintin Blake, have all the cynicism and some of the wit of Dahl, but none of the joy, raw creativity or exuberance.

Jack Saul

I think its probably fair to say that Roald Dahl didn't like adult women very much. His work is full of amazing twinkly adult men but women are either hysterics, grotesques or doormats. Miss Honey from Matilda and the grandmother in The Witches being the only exception from the children's books. Dahl is simultaneously fascinated (read: super horny for) and repulsed and frustrated with women. With this in mind I think of this story as a kind of concept driven horror movie in the vein of "what if that creepy doll was haunted?" " what if my beautiful passive fecund 50s housewife was actually a stone cold calculating killer?" this thing that's meant to be cute and enjoyable turns out to be dangerous and frightening. You don't get to hear what the husbands reasoning for leaving her is because it allows Dahls male reader to insert whatever personal reasons he has fantasised about leaving his wife for into the gap.....and then experience the full horror of her transformation. Sure we follow the wife's POV, but it's like the bit in Silence of the Lambs when you are following what Buffalo Bill is up to.

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

I had a a huge collection of Dahl’s books as a kid and I devoured them like a cop eating a murder weapon. I must beat the drum of you guys covering Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (either after covering Chocolate Factory or not) there’s some serious “Event Horizon” shenanigans going on in that one. I didn’t realize this story was by him also, I read it when I was in Jr High and I don’t remember what lead me to it. I thought about it A LOT. I was also reading a lot of Agatha Christie and had an extensive collection of Nancy Drew books, so this may have stood out to me as “Baby’s First Crime Drama From The Killer’s Perspective”. I can’t say I’m surprised at who the author is, considering “George’s Marvelous Medicine”, where a kid tries to kill his great aunt (or was it a grandmother?) with a pill he makes using stuff he found laying around in a barn, or “The Twits” (about some intensely unpleasant neighbors who decide to try out being cannibals,, but the group of boys they plan on eating manage to get them trapped in a situation where they themselves are eaten alive by birds.)

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

The Five Stages of Grief is rather misunderstood, I'm afraid. Intended to describe what the terminally ill went through and not intended to be linear. But, heck, denial and anger seemed appropriate as you called them out, so why not? As much as I do love this sort of story, I feel rather queasy after. It is very bad to leave your pregnant wife. It is worse to kill your husband for leaving you. So as much as we shouldn't be on the husband's side, we really really shouldn't be on the murderer's side. But I certainly was in reading it. It is only on reflection that I remember that revenge killings aren't cool, man.

Jason Thompson

This was great. You should do more Dahl!

Andrew Brown

What I pictured the husband said: I can’t take this anymore, I’m smothered, I can’t move without you saying, can I get you something oh it’s my fault what do you need, it’s too much I can’t keep being the center of your universe.

Andrew Brown

I think all of the great children’s books are grim. It’s some adults who think being a child is “fun” or “easy”, think a book like Johnny Tremayne, or The Brothers Grimm, or Lewis Carrol. All the greats are brutal.

Jim Cannon

Trying not to be annoyed by the Irish cops stereotype.

Cole Caron

A more science fiction-y Dahl short story for you to cover might be “the Great Automatic Grammatizator” in which an inventor creates a machine that can write an award winning novel in fifteen minutes. Naturally, a writer as darkly comic as Dahl is going to have some fun thoughts on how this machine would impact the field of publishing.

Warwick Davey

I'm shocked to learn that Roald Dahl wrote grown up crime stories and other stuff that's not for kids! Not to mention him getting 'pimped out' for king and country!

Shadavid

“The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers. She whips a pistol from her knickers. She aims it at the creature's head, And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.” Three of the more memorable lines in literature for me...

Shadavid

Four! of the more memorable lines. Memory trumps numeracy!

Doug McCool

That woman went fully psychotic almost instantly... I definitely don't think it matters whatever that guy said to her... she killed him for it, and immediately went Order-66, as if that had been some stored contingency plan.

It's a Ghost.

Here's a link to a great New Yorker article about Roald Dahl. It also includes a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, which I will include below. “In 1972, the Horn Book, a journal of children’s literature, published a screed against Dahl by Eleanor Cameron, a children’s-book author. ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ she charged, was ‘one of the most tasteless books ever written for children.’ The book was not just about candy; it was candy, ‘in that it is delectable and soothing while we are undergoing the brief sensory pleasure it affords but leaves us poorly nourished with our taste dulled for better fare.’ Dahl reviled television, but his book provided the same easy satisfactions: it was a fast-paced, plot-driven celebration of empty calories. The science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in to second Cameron’s criticism, though she had to admit that ‘children between eight and eleven seem to be truly fascinated’ by Dahl’s books. Indeed, one of her own children, she regretted to say, ‘used to finish ‘Charlie’ and then start right over from the beginning (she was subject to these fits for about two months at age eleven). She was like one possessed while reading it, and for a while after reading she was, for a usually amiable child, quite nasty.’ The books, Le Guin concluded, ‘provide a genuine escape experience, a tiny psychological fugue, very like that provided by comic books.’” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/11/the-candy-man

Brian J

What else was she mint to do, go on the lamb? Go to prison and get shanked? She was souvlaki she was able to curry favor with the chops. She's a real gyro in my book.

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

It just occurred to me to wonder if she got dressed up to go out… maybe put on that fun necklace of chestnut beads she’s had for years…

Pearce Duncan

Slam to the Laughter. Our teacher read this to us in intermediate (the equivalent of about 6th grade) I guess because Roald Dahl was considered a children’s author by a lot of people. We all found it pretty funny - as opposed to another, much more disturbing Dahl story she also read us called The Swan.

Phil Jensen

Chad saying "We gotta get into the children's book business, man...how hard can it be" just reminded me of that scene in the show "Black Books", where Bernard and Manny set out to write a children's book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ2cvGNAHjw

Forrest Rush

Any Dahl is good Dahl, but I guess that I've just read this story so many times that I just want to scream stupid experts at the detectives. I can't help but think this was just Dahl being twistedly sarcastic about stupid cops or stupid men. However, every time I taught this story in Freshman Comp class back in the 80's or use it now in the English as a Foreign Language classes, I am astounded by how many are shocked and surpised. Oh well I guess over-familiarity does breed cynicism or it's just me.

Cacodaemoniacal

Both of the main characters are presented in terms of their cultural gender-based roles. Subtext is she and her husband are probably Catholic (Mary Malone). She is PREGNANT, all goey in love, keeps a clean and cozy home, sews, has booze on the ready for herself (different time) and the husband. Is, ahem PREGNANT. He is a manly, breadwinning policeman. Then they both switch to dark side. I think notable that their chairs are opposite to each other, I'm not sure if it's in opposition, solidarity or if it too flips. She goes from besotted wife to a killer, clear eyed and calculating. He goes from a strong and manly provider to a selfish and deserting cad who's probably having an affair. More worried about the effect upon his career than her feelings. We go from "Awwwww, how cozy" to "I hope she gets away with it!" (your mileage may vary). I wonder if her giggling at the end is like those endings on Hitchcock's show, where if in the story the baddie got away, instead of changing it for the sponsors so that they didn't, he explained that they were caught and went up the river. You can see her either giggling quietly to herself pretending to cry, or going wackadoo and admitting her guilt.

Josephine, Who Lurks

I wouldn't have thought from the narration that this one would wind up being so high-concept that it came from a one-sentence suggestion. Plus I'm impressed at how deftly Dahl avoids letting the comedy of the setup leak out and spoil the tension, so that the heroine gets to laugh and earn some relief at the same time as the audience knows she's really getting away with it. I feel like I must have seen part of an adaptation of this somewhere, but I'm disappointed that it wasn't turned into a Columbo episode.

Sean Dayes

Gents, my feed is coming up all weird. I cannot find new episodes on patreon and my RSS feed stopped updating in July of last year. Any ideas how to fix?

Falconhoof

I heard a rumour that DingDongTron is pushing hard to acquire the rights to 'Pearl and the Piranha'. Their output has been sorely lacking, ever since 'Dracula's Kitchen' got cancelled. I loved that show, but all he ever cooked was chicken.

Professor Murder

Dahl is like Lovecraft for me in that it is in some ways easier to appreciate and approach his work now that he is dead, given his vigorous antisemitism. When the glaring antisemitic tropes of "The Witches" was pointed out to me some years ago, I was struck by how foolish I felt not to have recognized them earlier. That is not to say one can not partake of his work, but just that one has a moral obligation to recognise its influence, just as one has to for the ugly views of Lovecraft.