James and the Giant Peach

by Roald Dahl

Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.

They were dead and gone in thirty-five seconds flat. Poor James, on the other hand, was still very much alive, and all at once he found himself alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world.

The garden, which covered the whole of the top of the hill, was large and desolate, and the only tree in the entire place (apart from a clump of dirty old laurel bushes at the far end) was an ancient peach tree that never gave any peaches.

“I think you’d make,” Aunt Spiker said, “a lovely Frankenstein.”

“There’s more power and magic in those things in there than in all the rest of the world put together,”

“Crocodile tongues!” he cried. “One thousand long slimy crocodile tongues boiled up in the skull of a dead witch for twenty days and nights with the eyeballs of a lizard! Add the fingers of a young monkey, the gizzard of a pig, the beak of a green parrot, the juice of a porcupine, and three spoonfuls of sugar. Stew for another week, and then let the moon do the rest!”

“Of course I’m not talking to you, you ass!” the Centipede answered. “That crazy Glow-worm has gone to sleep with her light on!”

Aunt Spiker lay ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book.

This building happened to be a famous factory where they made chocolate,

“I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican!” wailed the Old-Green-Grasshopper.