Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916 - November 23, 1990) was a British author of Norwegian descent most famous for his distinctively dark but often whimsical children's novels and poetry collections, though he started out as a writer of short stories for adults.
His style is exemplified by Black Comedy, and as a result even his juvenile stories contain a good deal of more-than-usually sophisticated Nightmare Fuel. The fact that said young target audience has been happily lapping all this up for decades now seems to imply that many kids actually like to be terrified (hey, it works for Doctor Who).
Trademarks include his love of nostalgia for his own childhood (with which he generally manages to avoid alienating his younger readers) and his great love of Food Porn. Almost all of the happy endings in his work revolve, in some way, around food... although many of them aren't exactly happy. He had less wonderful memories about the headmasters at his school terrorizing, humiliating and caning pupils as was common in those days, as mentioned in his autobiographical novel Boy. His not-unreasonable conclusion that all Humans Are Bastards would inspire a lot of his later stories.
His works for adults are almost universally cynical and pessimistic about human nature; his works for children take the same attitude to a whole other level, featuring arrogant, wicked and/or just plain mean adults who menace innocent youngsters (or, in a couple of memorable cases, fuzzy little animals) more or less just because they can. Sometimes these are traditional boogeymen (e.g., The Grand High Witch in The Witches, the Giants in The BFG), but more often they're simply irredeemably vile grownups. Just how irredeemable is spelled out in exquisite detail on almost every page.
It would be a case of Beauty Equals Goodness, except that most of his small heroes and heroines are themselves deliberately pretty average. They're also in large part Aesop-proof by virtue of their already-innate goodness, intelligence, and/or resourcefulness. They generally succeed in foiling the bad guys simply by first recognizing and then rising above the relentless nastiness and/or or stupidity around them. If you're starting to suspect that there were very few grey areas in Dahl's POV, you're right.
