‘The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box)’ Review: A Childhood Survival Story as Strange and Beguiling as Its Title

It is a morbid tradition of children’s fiction that parents must often be dispatched, as quickly and unsentimentally as possible, for the adventure to proceed — sometimes discreetly, or sometimes, as in Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach,” as violently as a rhinoceros attack in paragraph two. In storybook logic, such eliminations often enable […]