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Fear

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About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Fear by Roald Dahl, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, Kevin Eldon, Tom Felton and Rory Kinnear.

Do you enjoy being scared? Featuring fourteen classic spine-chilling stories chosen by Roald Dahl, these terrible tales of ghostly goings-on will have you shivering with fear as you turn the pages.

They include such timeless and haunting stories as Sheridan Le Fanu's The Ghost of a Hand, Edith Wharton's Afterward, Cynthia Asquith's The Corner Shop and Mary Treadgold's The Telephone.

 Anthologies & Short Stories Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Short Stories Comedy Haunted Ghost

Critic reviews

A collection of deliciously dark ghost stories for adults, picked by Roald Dahl himself . . .

Do you enjoy being scared? Featuring fourteen classic spine-chilling stories chosen by Roald Dahl, these terrible tales of ghostly goings-on will have you shivering with fear as you turn the pages.
Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive
The absolute master of the twist in the tale
All stars
Most relevant
Famously drawn from a long-list of 749 stories, these 14 ghostly tales reflect the best of spooky short fiction as viewed by curator, Roald Dahl. No stranger to a rum yarn, Dahl's choices range from late Victorian through to the 1960s, with the emphasis firmly on slow suspense and atmospheric chills. Amongst the authors selected here are some big guns of the classic Ghost Story format, but it's a selection notable for it's omissions as much as anything else (no room at the inn for Monty? And surely some Shirley would have been fitting?); frankly, even some of the efforts from the ghoulish glitterati are hardly their best (Sheridan Le Fanu's 'The Ghost Of A Hand' is terrible, whilst E.F. Benson's 'In The Tube' is a decent story strangled at birth by it's own speculative cod-philosophising). Interestingly, many of the stories feature ambiguous or diffident apparitions ('Afterward'; 'On The Brighton Road'; 'A Christmas Meeting'; 'The Telephone') and two of the stronger stories here (Cynthia Asquith's 'The Corner Shop' and A.M. Burrage's 'Playmates') are haunted by benign presences. I suspect a key criteria of Dahl's selections was how easily these stories would be adaptable to television.
For good, old-fashioned malignancy, the most potent pieces are F. Marion Crawford's 'The Upper Berth' and Rosemary Timperley's 'Harry'. Elsewhere, 'Elias and the Draug' by Jonas Lie is a creditable attempt to broaden the remit and move further afield (Norway, in this instance), but it is an unfortunately dull tale. Best in show, by some distance, is Robert Aickman's eerie and enigmatic 'Ringing The Changes'; easily highlight of the set for me.
Of the narration, it's a pretty good bunch: Tom Felton is okay; Rory Kinnear puts in stout work and lifts some of the more middling tales; and Julian Rhind-Tutt's dry, haughty voice is always a supercilious pleasure. Kevin Eldon is the revelation for me; I'd only known him from his oddball comedy roles but he has a wonderful voice for audiobooks, rather like Robert Hardy: ideal for golden age detective fiction or classic ghost stories, which is handy here...


The Six Weird Roads Of Death

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A wonderful collection of classic ghost stories, well chosen (by a master) and very well read. these are NOT bedtime stories :-)

Absolutely classic

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Some genuinely creepy moments here -especially a couple of stories from the experts who knew how effective a slow build up can be. One of the things I liked best about this collection is that it features locations normally neglected in the genre - on board a ship for example - and interesting personalities, fully developed. A cold guardian and a damaged young girl are both transformed by a lengthy haunting. A loving but blinkered wife is brought to a new understanding of her husband's personality by an unexpected visitation.

And if you've seen American Werewolf in London, you'll know that dread and laughter are a dream ticket. In one story in particular, the description of the tremendous resentment demonstrated by a maid subjected to reasonable questioning by her mistress had me laughing, despite the sinister events which occasioned the interrogation.

Although most of the stories are set during the genre's golden age (the Victorian and Edwardian eras) the collection contains examples of what is still everyday contemporary horror too - as, for example, when a loved one walks through a door into the great silence, a mystery with no resolution. These authors know that leaving a certain amount up to the reader's own imagination - refusing to explain everything - is an effective way of magnifying dread. A picture on the side of a milk carton can represent the greatest horror of all, when you think about it.

Goosebumps

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Well done, Roald Dahl for putting together this collection. A treat to find a well written and narrated set of stories with a hint of the supernatural. Not something you come across often.

Good collection of stories, well narrated

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As story collection go, id say this is one of the better. Worth a go.

Ok. Not a bad collection.

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