Lamb to the Slaughter

Lamb to the Slaughter is a short-story collection in Roald Dahl's series of "fairy tales for adults," originally published as Deception. The Chinese edition was translated by Ma Ainong and produced by Guomai Culture. The book gathers ten short stories on the theme of deception. Over his lifetime Dahl wrote more than sixty adult short stories, which are grouped by theme into six categories—deception, madness, cruelty, lust, cunning, and fear—and this volume collects the stories belonging to the "deception" group. The characters who appear are a varied lot: a clergyman scheming to swindle antiques, a farmer going to great lengths to hide his treasure, a couple cheating at cards, a bookshop that makes no money from selling books, a musician impersonating Chopin, a company that specializes in revenge, a policeman who swallows the murder weapon, a drunkard who steals umbrellas to sell for cash, and a Southern gentleman devoted to betting. These stories are short, told in crisp, clean prose, and their endings are often unexpected yet entirely plausible; a clever con, after all, is usually just an illusion waiting to be exposed, and humor and a chill run side by side. The title story, Lamb to the Slaughter, was once placed first on his personal reading list by A. J. Fikry, proprietor of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry; The Southern Gentleman was included in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspense Stories and was later adapted by Quentin Tarantino into one segment of the film Four Rooms.