Du Maurier turns a ‘No, that’s not possible‘ incredible idea into a grim, deadly, hope extinguishing reality. The thing that I liked most about the story was the skilful way in which, in a very few pages. ‘The Birds’ is threaded through with threat, made larger by vivid violence and the struggle to accept the inexplicable but undeniable. The original story is forty pages of slowly intensifying threat as what starts out as a shocking aberration, a nighttime incursion into the children’s bedroom by apparently desperate small birds, lashing out in terror and confusion, but becomes something more sinister, more deadly and much harder to take in – all the different species of birds working together in an organised way to attack humanity. There’s just an observant, self-reliant farmworker, living in an isolated cottage on a peninsula, trying to ensure that his family survive an inexplicable and lethal change in the world. There’s no Tippi Hedren character delivering lovebirds. We’re in coastal Cornwall shortly after the war. The final story, The Old Man didn’t work for me so I haven’t reviewed it.įorget the Hitchcock movie, We’re not in California in the 1960s. I’ve reviewed each of the first five stories below. They’re original, character-driven, vivid, surprisingly modern and quite different from one another.
I found each of the fiche stories to be deeply engaging. Kiss Me Again, Stranger: an encounter with a stranger that changes the life of an otherwise ordinary man.The Little Photographer: a story of indolent self-indulgence leading to violence and grief.Monte Verità: a story about the pursuit of a life beyond the ordinary.The Birds: a piece of speculative fiction about how humans react to a sudden and deadly change in their environment.There are six stories in ‘The Birds and other stories’, the first five of which I liked:
The mountain paradise of ‘Monte Verità’ promises immortality, but at a terrible price a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject’s life a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery and a jealous father finds a remedy when three’s a crowd. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man’s sense of dominance over the natural world. A classic of alienation and horror, ‘The Birds’ was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film.
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