When coping with grief or other kinds of distress in their lives, people will find ways to cope. Plenty will find a healthy way to get themselves through the day, be it art, sports, reading, or just talking their feelings out and maybe having a good, cathartic cry on the bad days. For some people though, these things don’t work. They can’t find something, anything, that will help with the pain and let them recover, so they turn to unhealthy, damaging habits to just keep themselves going, and from there spiral down until their way to cope has become another monster in its own entirety. An example of this is the landlady from Roald Dahl’s short story “The Landlady”, who has seemingly turned to murder and taxidermy to keep herself afloat.
Billy Weaver, a young businessman, is looking for a place to stay in London, and rents a room at the landlady’s place. His first impression of her is very kind, and then “slightly dotty” when she says that “it isn’t very often I have the pleasure of taking a visitor into my little nest”. Strange as it may seem that the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in a big city rarely has customers, what really makes her start seeming creepy is what she says next: that “it is such a pleasure, my dear, such a very great pleasure when now and again I open the door and I see someone standing there who is just exactly right… like you”. She then proceeds to look Billy up and down, very slowly, as if inspecting a specimen to be dissected under a microscope.
What really begins to prove her murderous tendencies, though, is her uncanny knowledge of the physical properties of two “tall, handsome young men”- just like Billy- who had stayed there years prior. Of one, she says that his teeth were white, but not as white as Billy’s; of the other, she says that “there wasn’t a blemish on his body”. Body, not face. The landlady would have had no reason or opportunity to see that young man undressed, so how would she know? In addition, she tells Billy that those two young men have never left, and when she forgets their names then she “come[s] down here and look[s] it up”. That, combined with the fact that she has quite a few “little pets” that she keeps taxidermied and displayed in life-realistic positions in the living room, would indicate that these two young men have been murdered- and then “stuffed”, as her pets are- and kept upstairs on the fourth floor.
Another detail to consider is that the tea the landlady serves Billy “tasted faintly of bitter almonds”. Bitter almonds is a taste associated with cyanide, a highly toxic substance, seemingly fairly little of which is required to kill a person. It would be very easy to dissolve in a hot cup of tea and disguise with milk and sugar, both of which Billy takes with his tea. If Billy drank it- which he does- it can be assumed that he dies quietly, bloodlessly, making it very easy for the landlady to stuff him and add him to her collection.
These murders and stuffings can be seen as a damaging habit the lady developed to cope with a loss during the war that took place several years prior to the story- perhaps, as Billy suggested, the loss of a son. It would explain why she collects young men who are “just right” and keeps them: to take the place of someone irreplaceable, someone she will never have back.