The war's impact on Dahl as a person and a writer is also evident in the autobiography of his war years,
Going Solo (1986). West writes:
According to Dahl, he had the mindset of a businessman before the crash, but afterwards he began thinking like a writer. The brush with death and the time he spent convalescing in the hospital made him more introspective and creative. He began paying attention to his dreams and fantasies and developed an interest in aesthetics.
The essential traits of Dahl's perspective and thus his fiction derive from ghastly, horrifying experiences, so it is not surprising that the fiction is bizarre, fantastic, and even grotesque to some.
Although there is considerable disagreement about the overall quality of Dahl's short fiction and the duration of his most successful literary period, there is no argument about the fact that his stories are engrossing, highly entertaining reading, since two of his collections, Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss, Kiss (1960) became best-sellers in the United States. According to Richard Brickner (New York Times Book Review, 21 October 1974), "an ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploration, are the first strengths of Dahl's story-telling." Granville Hicks (Saturday Review, 20 February 1960) adds that "his great gift is for telling a macabre incident in such a way that the reader shudders and smiles at the same time." Maurice Dolbier (New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 7 February 1960) comments that Dahl's purpose is to entertain and that he "has little patience with short-story writers who are more concerned to satisfy their own self-esteem than the interest of readers." Thus--despite complaints about lack of thematic profundity, about harmfully superficial and stereotypical characterization, and even about obsessively compulsive sexual fixations in his stories for adults (particularly the most recent ones)--Dahl has succeeded in being widely read and highly praised as an imaginative, original writer of carefully crafted, suspenseful, and ironically surprising stories.
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