A review by thereadingmum
Don't Look Now and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
dark
tense
medium-paced
3.5
Disclaimer: I am a very hard to please short story reader. To me, the format requires very good, very succinct writing with absolutely no excess and hits you so hard you are left reeling either emotionally or intellectually. As such, I have only come across a handful of writers who can write really good short stories. This includes writers whose full-sized novels I have loved, yet somehow couldn't pull off the short format.
So it is with Du Maurier, whose novels I have enjoyed. To be fair, two of the stories here I think are quite good, The Blue Lenses and The Apple Tree, which were creepy AF and exciting from the get go with excellent endings. The rest though kinda fell flat. I was particularly disappointed with The Birds. It is very frightening with how sudden and unexpected the violence and group psychotic behavior of the birds was, but then the ending had this extreme hopelessness, which I really didn't like. I know now that I have read it before and the fact that I forgot how it ended reinforces my critque. I felt that it needed a bit more in terms of the struggle and the explanation, perhaps just one or two more radio communiques to graduate the despondency.
So it is with Du Maurier, whose novels I have enjoyed. To be fair, two of the stories here I think are quite good, The Blue Lenses and The Apple Tree, which were creepy AF and exciting from the get go with excellent endings. The rest though kinda fell flat. I was particularly disappointed with The Birds. It is very frightening with how sudden and unexpected the violence and group psychotic behavior of the birds was, but then the ending had this extreme hopelessness, which I really didn't like. I know now that I have read it before and the fact that I forgot how it ended reinforces my critque. I felt that it needed a bit more in terms of the struggle and the explanation, perhaps just one or two more radio communiques to graduate the despondency.