“The Landlady” by Roald Dahl was a pretty interesting story. It starts with Billy Weaver, a 17-year old, looking for a place to stay. He was planning to go check out The Bell and Dragon Pub, but ends up being drawn to the Bed and Breakfast. Immediately after Billy rang the doorbell, the landlady answered the door and invited Billy in. After a discussion about the surprising lack of customers and the landlady’s particularity concerning who stays at her establishment, the landlady showed Billy to his room. The landlady then asked Billy to sign his name in the guestbook. When Billy opened the guestbook, he noticed that only two other names were written down. He recognized the names, but he struggled to recall where he had heard them. The landlady distracted Billy by giving him some tea. However, Billy considered the tea’s smell to be peculiar. As Billy and the landlady sat and sipped their tea, Billy noticed that some animals that he had previously seen in the building were actually taxidermy. Billy admired the landlady’s taxidermy skills. During the conversation, Billy asked if there had been any other tenants since the two in the guestbook, and after telling Billy that the two tenants still lived in the building, the landlady told Billy that he was the only new tenant. The story implies that the landlady may have killed and preserved the bodies of the previous two tenants, and that she plans to do the same to Billy.
The moral of the story is don’t judge a book by its cover. The landlady was acting really friendly, and Billy didn’t really think about. He thought she was just a really nice person, but it turned out she was evil. It was pretty interesting, and I wonder why the landlady would want to do this.