By Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl at his most gleefully revolting, about two horrible people who richly deserve each other.
Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the two ugliest, dirtiest, meanest people you could dream up, and they spend their days playing horrible tricks on each other. She drops her glass eye into his beer so it glares up at him. He slips wriggly worms into her spaghetti. He convinces her she's shrinking. They keep a family of monkeys locked upside down in a cage and glue birds to a tree to bake into a pie, until the animals decide they have had quite enough, and cook up a revenge so perfect the Twits never see it coming.
It's short, it's funny in the rudest possible way, and the whole thing runs on the delicious idea of two awful people out-nasty-ing each other, which a reluctant reader will race through just to see who wins. Dahl never asks you to like the Twits, so the meanness plays as pure cartoon comedy, and Quentin Blake's scratchy drawings make the ugliness half the joke. The revenge the animals pull off at the end is the kind of tidy, satisfying comeuppance that sends a child straight to the next Dahl on the shelf.