On this day back in the gray flannel of 1990, Roald Dahl – twisted genius, not-so-subtle sadist, benevolent trickster – finally bought the proverbial farm.  The man who gave us Matilda, The Witches, and James and the Giant Peach left behind a trail of Wonka Bars, oversized fruit, and gloriously terrified children.

Dahl was the kind of writer who understood that children are not fragile porcelain dolls that will crack under the slightest stress, but feral little anarchists who crave stories where adults are exposed as buffoons, tyrants, or monsters.  He weaponized fairy-tale logic against the smug machinery of grown-up authority.  His villains were fat-assed headmistresses, sadistic witches, greedy aunts, and bureaucratic swine.  His heroes were children armed with wit, rage, and the occasional giant insect.  He infiltrated the sterile, pastel-colored world of children’s books with the subtlety of a rhino in a dollhouse.  He took the saccharine bullshit that passed for kid-lit and injected it with a bit of arsenic, then served it with a wink.  He took the treacly pieties of conventional children’s stories, fed them to his private Oompa-Loompas, and had the little orange bastards sing mocking songs while the corpses were pulped into strawberry jam.  Every Dahl book is a miniature morality play in which adults, those lumbering, flatulent, child-crushing tyrants, are ritually humiliated, mutilated, or explosively murdered for the entertainment of small readers.  Miss Trunchbull swing-setted into oblivion.  Augustus Gloop sucked up a chocolate river like a human Hoover.  The Twits glued to their own ceiling.  Bruce Bogtrotter forced to eat an entire cake until he turns the color of a bruised eggplant.  This was revenge literature for eight-year-olds who already sensed that the deck was stacked against them by monsters in cardigans.  Dahl’s particular brand of alchemy was to stare into the abyss of adult cruelty and then, with a manic grin, hand the kid a stick of dynamite.    He taught me (along with all his other child readers who were paying attention) that grown-ups are more often than not idiots, that authority is usually questionable, and a little bit of magic and a whole lot of balls can change the whole goddamn world, all of which has been confirmed again and again in adulthood.

So tonight I’ll be raising a glass of something dark and viscous (probably the dregs of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river, with a dash of witch’s blood) to the nastiest, funniest, most unrepentantly vicious children’s writer who ever lived.  The giants have stopped dreaming.  The foxes are out of ideas.  The BFG’s snozzcumbers will rot on the vine.  Roald Dahl is dead.  Long live Roald Dahl.

N.P.: “The Cult of Chaos – The Chaos of Cults Remix” – PIG, Rabbit Junk