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I love this topic but struggled to come up with an answer for it because I don’t read many fiction books that share weird facts in them.
Finally, I thought of a response. When I was a teenager, one of my English teachers assigned “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl to us. I’m afraid I must spoil the ending of this horror mystery tale in order to write my post, so do go read it first if you’re not already familiar with what happens. It’s a short read.
Now that you’ve all had a chance to read it for yourselves, this tale was about a young man who was meeting up with a landlady who happened to have a room available to rent to him. She was a rather strange woman who seemed to be obsessed with taxidermy. The story ends with the young man drinking a cup of tea she offered him that tasted faintly of bitter almonds.
We were all confused about that detail until our teacher told us that cyanide tastes like bitter almonds.
Yes, she poisoned him. After he died, she was planning to taxidermy him just like she had with her previous two boarders.
We were all a little horrified by how this story ended, but it was a memorable one for sure!
