After the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Dahl became obsessed with the idea of an imminent Third World War and certain nuclear holocaust. And so, when the gremlins re-entered his creative consciousness, he transformed them from the sweet Disneyfied figures of his picture book into something more sinister—a race of hideous subterranean beings, gleefully waiting for humanity’s self-destruction. These newly imagined gremlins would become the central figures of Dahl’s first novel, Some Time Never, a pacifist fable on the subject of nuclear war. Published in 1948, the novel failed to impress readers or critics and soon sank into obscurity. It can be said to have set back Dahl’s career as a writer, forcing him to reinvent himself, first as a “Master of the Macabre” with his adult short stories in the 1950s, and later as a children’s writer from the 1960s on.
