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(Grandmamma wasn't kidding about them being the meanest.)

In fact, English witches like to create powders that can transform a child into a creature hated by adults, so that the adults will then kill their own children.

The night before they leave, Grandmamma reveals a little more information about witches: There are more witches in Norway than in England, but the English ones are the meanest.

Neither of them wants to go, but they respect the wishes of his dead parents and plan to head back to England, the Land of Strange Spelling.

In the beginning of this chapter, we get some bad news from the will of the narrator's father: he and his wife wanted their son to stay with his Grandmamma, of course, but in England.

So that there's a clear-cut bad guy, or, should we say, bad gal. That's all to say that Roald Dahl might be giving us the Grand High Witch just so we have someone to focus our hatred on.

Someone from Nebraska might make us really mad, but we don't assume that everyone from Nebraska is a jerk. Humans – at least the kind of humans who'd take the time to read a classic children's book – tend to only have such strong feelings toward one person at a time. Here's the thing: witches have the capacity to hate an entire group of people (children) but most humans don't.

She's just our scapegoat – we blame everything on her. When you think about it, though, any creature who can kill a child is clearly mean – and then some – so why is the Grand High Witch any different than the other witches? Well, in some ways, she's not. She's always yelling, calling her fellow witches "idiots" (9.36) and "blithering bumpkin" (8.34) and other things of the sort. The most important thing to remember about the Grand High Witch is that she's just plain mean. Nothing alive should look like it's worm-eaten. The narrator uses a whole bunch of adjectives and similes to describe her, but he pretty much sums it up with "worm-eaten" (7.7). When she takes her mask off, she becomes the most atrocious thing on the planet. When we first meet the Grand High Witch, she is young, pretty, and stylin'. Give this lady a bike and a theme song and she might as well take over for the Wicked Witch of the West – except, instead of your little dog, she'll get your little mouse, too.