Pilot Terror
Any time a pilot takes his plane into the air there is always the possibility of it not coming back down against for a safe landing. This is exponentially so for military pilots. The story basically commences with a portrait in imagery of the sensory response to a pilot upon that first indication that this could be the flight that does not end putting the aircraft safely back down on earth:
“At once the knowledge came to each of the pilots that something serious was wrong, and with that knowledge there came quickly a small nervous sensation, like the point of a cold needle moving slowly over the skin of the solar plexus”
Humans
Human beings as a species come off pretty bad in most works by Dahl. But the misanthropic view of the species to which he belongs rarely attains the heights of hyperbole or sinks to the depths of depravity as in the central imagery delineating the status of the sapiens:
“He is a miserable and ill-fated giant, a mountain of conceit and selfishness, a creature doomed now to perish at his own hands!”
Gremlins
The gremlins who entered the literary world as mere sprites with a perhaps too wicked sense of joy in anarchy become here a much darker creature. One can lay the blame on this transformation upon mankind, of course, and, if so, who is really to blame them for the imagery which reveals them as now being far removed from their origin as a potential Disney cartoon:
“World War III was more quick and sudden than either of its predecessors…deep down below the ground the Gremlins heard the distant whoof and roar of huge explosions; they felt the earth tremble…`There they go again!’ they shouted exultantly to one another as they listened to the faraway roar of the bombings overhead…`It’s quicker this time. Better and quicker, better and quicker, better and quicker’...they waited to see how great the destruction had been and whether the killing was complete.”
Dahl up the Misogyny
Roald Dahl is a famously misogynistic writer. Many of his most horrifically grotesque characters are females. This misogyny even gets applied to the less-than-human gremlin population. The man can’t seem to stop himself:
“a bald male is all right but a bald female, my god, it’s ugly…bald-headed and ugly as hell…worse, far worse than the male because the female of any type is always more scheming, cunning, jealous and relentless than the male.”
