I have many happy memories of devouring Dahl’s young-adult novels and short stories – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, but also Matilda and James and the Giant Peach and The Witches. They were all particularly satisfying for a child because they coupled fairy-tale-level evil adults (child-eating witches and child-torturing headmistresses and child-abusing aunts) with charmingly realistic, if astonishingly clever, children who managed to wrestle happy endings out of horrid situations. In his short stories written for an adult audience, Dahl maintains the same cleverness but gleefully abandons happy endings for brutal irony of the type O. Henry would have appreciated.
Forgive me for ruining one of the stories in the service of a review, but if I may illustrate: the contrast is most distinct when one compares the short story “Champion of the World” with the children’s book “Danny, Champion of the World,” which offer two permutations of the same plot, about poachers catching pheasants by feeding them raisins stuffed with sleeping pills. The plan is clever and seems to go off well for both sets of protagonists, but no one seems to have planned for what will happen when the birds wake up. While “Danny” (as I recall, aided by Wikipedia) ends with some absolution for our plucky youngster, who is able to still get his revenge on the evil pheasant hunters and walks away with a few pheasants for dinner, in the short story an infant (in whose carriage the sleeping birds were hidden) is terrified by a cloud of pecking pheasants and the poachers resign themselves to a failed endeavor.
And so it goes for Dahl’s heroes: hoisted by their own petard, generally, with a real “n” shaped story line. Someone is down on their luck, plots himself into good fortune and then, inevitably, runs afoul of the laws of the universe. The form could get a little repetitive, and as a reader you quickly find yourself looking for the flaw in the plan, trying  to anticipate how a scheme to buy antiques off of unwitting farmers or extort money from widows or store one’s brain after death could go awry. But Dahl is really an enjoyable writer, and unfailingly just that much more clever than the protagonist and so the stories fly by but still evoke a pained wince at each final turn.
This collection also contains a very different genre of stories, from his collection “Over to You,” which are realistic (and presumably semi-autobiographical) recountings of British pilots during WWII. While they’re also well-written and richly characterized, I found myself skimming them in a haste to get back to the more dramatically ironic stories in the rest of the book.