Am I the only person alive who
didn’t know that Daphne Du Maurier wrote ‘ Don’t Look Now’ (the basis of the
superlatively brilliant movie with Donald Sutherland) and ‘The Birds’ (which
was turned into the great Alfred Hitchcock movie)??
‘Don’t Look Now’ is a collection
of Du Maurier’s short stories and is absolutely entrancing. It contains some of
the most compelling and creepy short stories you are likely to come across. One
review comments, ‘That whooshing sound you hear is your mind being sucked into
the brilliant black depths of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic imagination, the
instant you begin reading the eponymous first story in Don’t Look Now….’
The book plays on our worst
nightmares – an encounter with psychic sisters and a small, dead child
appearing in the streets of Venice; a strange and sinister change in the
weather and the behaviour of the birds that you’ve been watching all your life;
a woman emerging from eye surgery to discover that her new eyes allow her to
see people as they really are – or do they?; a dalliance with a beautiful
stranger offers something more sinister than the prospect of a broken heart.
These stories show Du Maurier as
an astute student of human behaviour and physchology, with a keen eye for what
sends that small chill up your spine and a brilliant purveyor of the stories
that keep lurking at the back of your mind long after you have put the book
down.
Di
No comments:
Post a Comment