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A review by thereadingmum
Daphne du Maurier's Classics of the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier
3.5
I read this in tandem with The Folio Society collection Don't Look Now and Other Stories, which contains all the same stories and a few more but does not have "The Alibi".
My review is thus the same but I will add a mini one for The Alibi at the end.
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.
"The Alibi" starts off fairly intriguing as a future murder is indicated but then it devolves into a strange story of deflecting murderous intents with art. The ending was also odd and I may remember it for that rather then being macabre.
My review is thus the same but I will add a mini one for The Alibi at the end.
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.
"The Alibi" starts off fairly intriguing as a future murder is indicated but then it devolves into a strange story of deflecting murderous intents with art. The ending was also odd and I may remember it for that rather then being macabre.