Dylan’s short stories are awash with his memories of people and places, and as memories tend to be made up of the self same stuff of dreams, the characters and events drip with the excesses of the imagination. The latter collection in the book are taken from Adventures in the Skin Trade and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. They are classic Thomas such as Return Journey and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The first twenty short stories present a strange array of tales that sometimes befuddled me, sometimes drowned me in a glut of imagery, and sometimes just lost me in the telling. Isolating and violent but with the humanist always shining through in the finer details of the character’s actions. A small sentence in the story Where Tawe Flows sums it up for me ... ‘Wait a bit! Wait a bit!’ said Mr Humphries, ‘Let’s get our realism straight. Mr Thomas will be making all the characters Blue Birds before we know where we are. One thing at a time. Has anyone got the history of the character ready?’. With well endowed eccentricities Dylan portrays the Welsh personality with sincere profundity, as assuredly described in A Visit to Grandpa’s where everyone in the town knows where Grandpa is going when dressed in his Sunday best.

These tales are oozing with the macabre, from madness to murder, malady and perversion. With a background as a journalist Dylan knew how to tumble the everyday into scandal of fantasy, with an overriding sadness for the longing of the past made present in the retelling of personal memories and observations. This made most apparent in Return Journey where perhaps the bombing of Swansea was in someway a metaphor in how our reveries of time gone by lay as remnants in our mind, so that we may only recall glimpses of what we experienced in our youth. ( )

‘’He would think that love fails on such nights, and that many of its children are cut down.’’

Dylan Thomas is the writer who made me love poetry with his dark imagery and almost primal language. He is often compared to D.H.Lawrence and Thomas Hardy but I’ve always placed him side-by-side with Federico Garcia Lorca, one of my very favourite writers. Their inclination towards the darkest depths of the human soul, the use of a chaotic, punishing nature and a tradition that inspires and oppresses produced unparallel literary moments. Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales always brings my own childhood Christmas to mind. Christmas festivities spent in a city very different to the one in the story but no less nostalgic and mischievous. Long gone is the innocence and the ‘’what ifs’’ of a carefree childhood. They have been replaced by (not always welcome) knowledge and the uncertainty of reality. For me, Dylan Thomas’s work is a mirror that exposes everything that is hidden within us, the good and the evil, presented in a highly allegorical, raw language that fascinates and terrifies.

Most of the stories included were written for the Swansea Grammar School Magazine and are clearly the products of a unique mind. Many would consider the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog to be the gem of the collection but I am always drawn to the dark, the twisted, the macabre. Apart from A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which makes me feel as if I am about to put up the Christmas decorations even though Easter is only three weeks away, the stories that touched me soul are the children of a pen that produced a world of madmen and children fascinated with a tragic Crucifixion. A world populated by the exiled, the discarded, the isolated. A world of dark fairytales and Welsh legends, myths and twisted folklore, sexuality and mysticism. A world that makes you walk with beggars, fugitives, heathens and witches. A world where nature becomes a pagan altar where you dance with murderers and sinners. What material could be more ideal to create stories for demanding, doubting minds?

These are the stories that I have read again and again over the years. I will leave our favourite Christmas tale aside for now to enter a deep, murky darkness.

The Tree: A story that brings Edgar Allan Poe to mind, inspired by the Stations of the Cross, with a child strangely fascinated by Christ’s ordeal. The Jarvis Hills become a Welsh Golgotha. Or the Promised Land? Hard to distinguish the two in Thomas’s work.

“See what the stars have done,”

After the Fair: I’ve always wondered what happens to the energy of a place when a fair ends. There is an intense melancholy and a ‘’where will the next fair find me?’’ question that always touched my soul. This story is clearly influenced by Joyce and his After the Race story from Dubliners, and echoes Dostoevsky’s insight into the nature of the exiled, with two characters that deserve their own novel. A strange girl with a baby and a Fat Man.

The Dress: A nightmare born out of passion and restless persecution. A man’s obsession with a woman who acquires the role of the angel of temptation, a dark goddess whose realm is the pagan nature.
‘’Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head,
And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice
Of Him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.’’
William Blake

The Visitor: The Visitor that is sure to come to us one day, the Visitor that is usually uninvited and unwanted. The Visitor that doesn’t ask but gestures and we have no choice but to follow. A story where fairy tales and poetry create a dark fable.

The Vest: A story full of terror and dark sexuality. A dog, a terrible love and a deep sickness of a man whose obsession results in darkness and murder. A powerful text that makes you wonder on the chaos that was residing in young Thomas’s mind.

The Burning Baby: If there is a story that could surpass The Vest in terror, now obsession and twisted inclinations, it would be this. Nature is violated and becomes a product of a monstrous birth. It wants revenge and justice and works in mysterious ways. Hypocrisy, false piety, distorted images of love, Biblical punishments compose one of the most viciously powerful stories that you’ll ever read.

‘’It was six o’clock on a winter’s evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone long and yellow. In squeaking galoshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind.’’

‘’It’s the saddest night in the world,’’ I said.’’

The Followers: There are some winter evenings when your heart is gripped by merciless cold, the shadows become thicker and your soul is darkened by premonitions that verge on fear. And all these seem to spring out of nowhere. In our story, two young men decide to follow a young woman and a surprise awaits…

‘’The wind howled over Cader, waking the sleepy rooks who cawed from the trees louder than owls, disturbed the midwife’s meditations. It was wrong for the rooks, those sleepy birds over the zinc roofs, to caw at night. Who put a spell on the rooks? The sun might rise at ten past one in the morning.
Scream you, said Mrs. Price, the baby in her arms, This is a wicked world.’’

The School For Witches: Imagine that Macbeth’s Witches and the Salem girls from Miller’s The Crucible joined forces to bring everyone on their knees. A pagan hymn to the primal forces of the human nature that some would call ‘’black magic’’, others ‘’hysteria’’ and some would prefer the word ‘’power’’. A story where healing and remedy have no part to play. When Shakespeare meets the Bible, Hell happens. And it is beautiful…

‘’I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me.’’
Dylan Thomas

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )

On December 17th of 1843, Charles Dickens published his iconic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol. Everyone is familiar with the details and characters: Scrooge, Marley, Tiny Tim, and the visits of the three ghosts, Christmases Past, Present, and “Yet to Come.” The initial printing of 6,000 copies sold out in a few days and has been popular ever since. Dickens received credit for helping revive interest in old Christmas customs, including Christmas trees and the recently introduced Christmas cards. However, another tale hovers around the edges of Christmas reading – “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas. This prose work, originally written for radio, was recorded by Thomas in 1952. It takes a nostalgic view of Christmas from an earlier, simpler time.

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales in 1914, and dropped out of school at 16. He first worked as a journalist, but his poem, "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines" in 1934, laid the foundation for his literary reputation. Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne. He found it difficult to earn a living as a writer, so he turned to radio and speaking and reading tours. “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” became his most popular work, along with the poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Thomas’ Christmas tale is warm and pleasing to the mind. He begins the story like this,

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now […] out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six” (296).

Thomas then begins his nostalgic recollections, “Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours, [… and while…] we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: ‘It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down, and I knocked my brother down, and then we had tea’.” (297-298).

He continues, “For dinner, we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large, moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little, and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro” (301).

Sure sounds like many of my childhood Christmas memories at my grandparent’s home. Start a new tradition and read Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” around the tree on Christmas Eve. 5 stars

--Jim, 12/16/13 ( )

A short time ago I made myself thoroughly depressed by accidentally reading around the same time three unfinished works: Peake's "Gormenghast" novels, Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", and "Adventures in the Skin Trade" by Dylan Thomas. Now, Peake got so much down that I shouldn't really complain, and Svejk's misadventures at the front were beginning to get tiresome, so it was really the third that truly broke my heart. It's important to realize how impoverished we are by the early death of Dylan Thomas. His story of a young man with his finger stuck in a bottle shows every sign of having been about to be perfect. It's rare for me to laugh out loud at the printed page, but here it was practically unavoidable. I've always thought that if anything happens to us after we're dead there ought to be a library stocked with all the books my favorite authors never got around to writing; the first thing I'll do is pull "Adventures in the Skin Trade" off the shelf and settle down on a bit of cloud to read the whole thing.

But enough of that. There's more to the collection than that one unfinished work. The first several pieces aren't what I think of when I think of Dylan Thomas, which is not to say they aren't good. They're just creepy. Just a taste: in one it seems a little boy is preparing to nail the village idiot to a tree. Yikes. "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" contains semi-autobiographical pieces that are poignantly moving and quite funny. A favorite line from one: "Although I knew I loved her, I didn't like anything she said or did." I've said enough about "Adventures in the Skin Trade", but following it--what there is of it (single tear)--are a few short pieces which I have seen published together under the title of the first, "Quite Early One Morning." To me, these read like prose poems. They were the first Thomas I ever read and they were deeply resonant, touching something universal. I'm not from a seaside Welsh town, but boy did I feel like I was, or as though all growing-up had something of a seaside Welsh town built into it no matter who you are or where you're from. I recommend you read them out loud to yourself or to someone else and really feel how the words flow together (just remember to breath now and then). A last recommendation: if you celebrate, make a reading of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" a part of your family Christmas tradition. ( )

Dylan Thomas Stories reviewed by Greg Kaiser aka agkaiser: With significant exceptions, "The Collected Stories" chronical the life, if read in that order, of a sad and melancholy man, who was aware of but unwilling to accept the burden on consciousness of the futility of modern life. Thomas lightened his load, by and by, with increasingly frequent jokes and essays into humour. In many ways the stories are an accurate account of the everyday absurdity of Everyman; by one who lived at the time personality was displaced by the development of commercial media hype. Thomas died at age 39 in 1953. If he'd lived a few more years he might have described to us the age of common emotion and undifferentiated humanity, which breaks down only under the influence of alcohol to anything interesting and never unique; that he interpolated and prophecied from his eavesdropping into the lives of his comtemporaries. (No, I don't think that sentence is too long and I think Dylan would have approved.) He didn't spare himself from his snooping. Much of the content is autobiographical. But like a reporter, he just tells us the facts. The inferences and insights are your own. You have to read this volume! END