Both stories end in a wonderful plot twist that leaves you thinking that maybe, just maybe, there’s a lot more to Dahl than meets the eye with this kind of imagination.Ī third story in this collection, the story that this collection is named after, is about two next door neighbours who decide to have a bit of fun and sleep with each other’s wives without the wives knowing that they’re sleeping with a different man.

Called The Visitor, this story takes place in the Sinai Dessert, in which Oswald might be the unwilling participant in a plot to bring a wealthy family some good, intellectual company, and is left to decide whether he wants to seduce the lady of the house, or her equally sultry daughter. The second story is claimed to be the last story that is known of Oswald before he passed away, written in his personal diaries. The first chronological story in the collection, Bitch, centres around Oswald and a business partner of his creating a perfume that is so chock-full of pheromones that any man who smells it will immediately want to have sex with the first woman that he finds. Oswald loves nothing more than bedding woman after woman, having a personal rule that he never sleeps with the same woman twice and that he never lets a romance last longer than twelve hours (which he believes is pushing it, as even eight hours is already excessive). Two of the four stories centre around the same character – Oswald Cornelius, a man of world renown who loves opera, spiders, dressing well, and sex. The collection is full of sex and adultery, but without it being crass, rude, or even just outright disgusting. There are only four stories in this collection, four stories that are a bit longer than the other stuff I’ve reviewed by Dahl before (in terms of his short stories) but four stories that have so much to them.

Reading this book, however, I have to say that Dahl has found a way around this without making his stories too dirty or too raunchy. I had a conversation with a friend recently who said that the problem with writing adult stories is that it feels like you have to write gratuitous sex scenes into it just for it to classify as an adult story and get the attention that it deserves from that market.

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl