Book Review: The Witches by Roald Dahl

I remember watching The Witches frequently as a child and being both delighted and terrified. There’s something about it that ensnares you from the start. As the book states this is no fairy tale. A happy ending is most likely not in sight. For the witches are terrifying inhumane creatures made of darkness and dust and they will stop at nothing to meet their end goal. To eradicate the child population.

This ain’t no Matilda and it sure as hell is no Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Witches are as real as me and you and they hide in plain sight. They’re cunning, witches are. They wear long wigs, are never without gloves, and can smell a clean child miles away.

What they want most of all is a world that is child-free and they’ll do anything to get it. When the Grand High Witch gathers all of the witches of England and reveals her plan to wipe out all of the children in England it’s up to one English boy to thwart her plan and save them all.

This is a children’s book but it has subtle elements of horror that weren’t quite conveyed in the movie. The main protagonists are the boy and his Grandmama. She is a chain cigar smoking 86 year old who takes him in after his parents die in an accident. She’s not your ordinary grandmother as you might guess and she knows a whole lot about witches. She knows what they look like, how to avoid them, and how they get their means.

The witches are terrifying. Balding with long fingernails and basically blocks for feet. Why they want to wipe out kids is never fully elaborated. I mean…what the hell are they going to do when all the kids are eradicated? Lmao.

I enjoyed this book a lot though It isn’t my first time reading it but it’s my first time in awhile and I forgot how much I truly enjoyed it 🙂 It’s dark but there are several parts where I laughed out loud at the exaggerated absurdity of it

I strongly recommend the movie as well because the ending in the book didn’t really do it for me but the movie is perfection.

‘Heaven shall take my soul, but Norway shall keep my bones.’