Charming Baker designs covers for Roald Dahl's collections of dark short stories

British artist Charming Baker has created artworks for four Roald Dahl collections of adult short stories. The books, titled Lust, Madness, Deception and Cruelty, are dark comedies, illustrated by Charming in an aptly sinister and surreal fashion.

Cruelty is a collection of ten stories exploring the streak of nastiness in people, with a cover featuring a creepy scratched out face of a child in chintzy wallpaper. Deception is all about intrigue and lies, and is conveyed by a painting of an elephant-headed human.

‘What I’m interested in are the ideas of reality and unreality, of life and death, of issues we all have about the human condition,” says Charming. “I love the way Roald Dahl questions these themes in his adult short stories; the dark underbelly of life we are all fascinated by.”

The collection is published by Michael Joseph (Penguin).