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Back in 2021, I fell in love with Daphne du Maurier through reading her most beloved novel Rebecca. I was blown away by her writing style, the novel's atmosphere and beauty; and so I vowed to read as much of hers as I could. Du Maurier was a prolific writer, publishing 17 (!) novels and 6 short story collections during her lifetime. I knew I never wanted to read all of them but I wanted to read her big four � the so called Cornish novels � as well as her two short stories � "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now" � which were turned into popular movies. Now in 2024, by reading this book here, I have finally accomplished that goal.

I would consider du Maurier one of my favorite writers but she differs greatly from other "classical" writers I call favorites. Du Maurier is way more messy. She can give you romance and sex as well as mystery and intrigue. She's way more explicit than other writers of her time. And above all, she's fun to read. But I don't like all of her novels equally: Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel were brilliant, Frenchman's Creek and Jamaica Inn ... not so much. The two short story collections I've read from her � The Birds and Other Stories and Don't Look Now and Other Stories � were both solid, but not brilliant. So it's a mixed bag, but I still hold her works dearly and would recommend them.

Don't Look Now is a 1971 collection of five short stories, first published under the title Not After Midnight in Great Britain. Of the five stories, "The Way of the Cross" is the absolute standout. The two respective titular stories were great as well. "A Border-Line Case" was by far the weakest of the bunch, and "The Breakthrough" was pretty mediocre.

Don't Look Now (4 stars)
The titular story follows the married couple, John and Laura, on their first holiday after the death of their young daughter Christine. It's a mystery story (and truly a wild ride!) that also grapples with themes of grief and different ways to cope with it.

'Don't look now,' John said to his wife, 'but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.'

In a restaurant, the couple encounters a set of identical twin sisters, which Laura thinks to be "male twins in drag." The blind one claims to have psychic abilities; she tells Laura that Christine is still with them and trying to warn them that they are in danger if they remain in Venice. Whilst Laura believes these claims, John is skeptical (...to say the least, at one point he thinks: "False old bitch, I know they followed us" LMAO). During a night out, John hears a cry and sees what appears to be a small girl running along an alley. He later learns that the city has been plagued by a series of recent murders.

When the couple learns that their son has taken ill at boarding school, Laura leaves immediately and flies back to England. John vows to follow her with their car the next day. On his ride out of the city, he sees Laura on a vaporetto with the twins, apparently heading back into the city. Instead of leaving the city himself, John searches for his wife for hours on end but is unable to locate her. Later that evening, when he calls the boarding school, he is distressed to find that Laura is, in fact, in England. That same evening, John sees the little girl again who seems to be feeling from a man. Attempting to protect her from a presumed murderer, John follows her. The "child" is revealed to be a middle-aged "woman dwarf". She pulls a knife from her sleeve and pierces John throat. As John slumps to the floor, thinking to himself "Oh God, what a silly way to die.", he has a vision of the vaporetto and realises it is a premonition of the scene in a few days' time when Laura and the sisters will return for his funeral.

The twists and turns in this story are truly wild and there's no way of seeing all of them coming. The ending took me out of the story due to how unrealistic it was, but otherwise Daphne had me at the edge of my seat. I shared John's sense of foreboding and didn't trust the twin sisters either.

Not After Midnight (4 stars)
Timothy Grey, a preparatory school headmaster, takes a holiday to the Greek island of Crete with the intent of finding some solitude in which to paint. On arrival at his hotel, he asks to move his accommodation to a better chalet, near the water's edge, which the hotel management agrees to with some reluctance. The reason becomes clear when he discovers that the chalet's previous occupant had drowned while swimming at night. Also staying at the hotel is Stoll, a drunken and obnoxious American, and his silent and apparently deaf wife. They spend every day out in a small boat, ostensibly fishing.

Grey finds a card in his chalet left by the previous occupant reading, "Not after midnight" and the number 38, which he realises is the number of Stoll's chalet. One morning, Grey follows the couple and discovers that their days are being spent collecting ancient artefacts from a local shipwreck, with Mrs Stoll diving and supplying the finds to her husband on the beach. Grey is spotted, and that evening Stoll offers a gift, presumably to keep him quiet. His wife invites him to visit their chalet, but "not after midnight". Timothy declines the invitation, but Mrs Stoll dives to his chalet in the night and leaves the gift on his front porch. In the morning, Grey resolves to return the unwanted gift, but finds that the Stolls have departed. Determined to find out more about the Stolls' activities, he hires a boat and � when exactly over the local shipwreck � looks into the depths to see Stoll's body, drifting in the current, tied to an anchor.

Similarly to the first story, I thought that "Not After Midnight" started out brilliantly, but then kinda fell apart towards the end. In the beginning, it was easy to sympathise with Timothy and his need for quiet. The fact that everyone acted so weirdly about his choice of abode freaked me out as much as it did him. When we then learn about the previous occupant's death, things started to click into place, and the sense of foreboding grew. When Mrs Stoll snorkelled to Timothy's place, after he didn't follow through on their invitation, to leave the gift, it was truly creepy. The atmosphere was there. The suspense was there. The ending, with Mr Stoll's death, came, yet again, out of the blue, and I struggle to make sense of it. Did Mrs Stoll kill her husband? If so, why?

A Border-Line Case (2 stars)
Shelagh Money, a 19-year-old aspiring actress who goes by the stage name of Jennifer Blair, is looking forward to her first big theatre role, playing Viola/Cesaro in Twelfth Night. She looks after her seriously ill father. One evening, as the two look through an old family album and Shelagh's father reminisces about his former friend and best man, Commander Nick Barry, he, quite unexpectedly, looks at Shelagh with a look of horror and disbelief on his face, collapses and dies.

Horrified by the events, Shelagh travels to Ireland to seek out Commander Barry and learn more about him and his relation to his father. She discovers that Nick lives a reclusive life on a small island. When she attempts to investigate further, she is kidnapped and taken to the island as Nick's "guest". Shelagh is shocked to see that he keeps on his desk a framed copy of her father's wedding photograph, which had been doctored to swap around the heads of the groom and the best man.

When Nick questions her, Shelagh lies and gives her stage name Jennifer Blair. When she asks him about the photograph, he tells her that his wife died shortly after their wedding. Shelagh finds herself strongly attracted to Nick. That night, they have sex in the back of a grocer's van. There, Nick admits that the photograph is a fake: a practical joke that the new bride took rather badly at the time, because Nick "got her drunk" one night and the two of them had sex, cheating on their respective husband and best friend. Although Shelagh is shocked to learn this about her mom, she tells Nick that she loves him and wants to be with him. Nick, however, is set on the two of them parting ways, and so Shelagh has no choice but to return to England.

'The trouble with you is, Jinnie, you won't grow up. You live in a dream world that doesn't exist. That's why you opted for the stage.' Her father's voice, indulgent but firm. 'One of these days, you'll come to with a shock.'

On the opening night of her play, she receives a letter from Nick and a photograph that she initially takes to be of herself in the role of Cesaro, but is in fact of Nick in the same role when he was a boy. Nick explains that she had reminded him of somebody - and has since realised that that person was himself. Shelagh at last understands her presumed father's dying look of horror and disbelief; with his last breath he had realised that Shelagh was not his biological daughter but Nick's.

YIKES. YIKES. YIKES. This story, ya'll. It wasn't for me, honey. I mean, the twist at the end is shocking, scandalous even. And I bet readers back in du Maurier's day were clutching their pearls, but to me, it felt so fucking forced. Why did Shelagh and Nick fall "in love" in the first place? They literally had one conversation. Shelagh was also giving damsel in distress, whilst Nick was the big brooding alpha male, and I just hate that dynamic.

But I really liked the beginning, and thought it was so well done and creepy when Shelagh initially spotted the fake wedding photo at Nick's place. I was really able to put myself in her shoes. Like, for real, imagine being in that situation. My fight or flight would've kicked in immediately, LMAO.

The Way of the Cross (5 stars)
A disparate party from the middle-class village of Little Bletford take a sightseeing cruise to Middle East, led by their local vicar. All are in their own individual ways unsatisfied with their lives and their relationships. When their vicar falls ill, just before a planned 24-hour excursion ashore to Jerusalem, his place is taken by the inexperienced Reverend Babcock, a man more used to mixing with the youth of his own slum parish in Huddersfield. On the first night of the cruise, Robin, a precocious nine-year-old and grandson of one of the couples, suggests a walk to the Garden of Gethsemane.

In the dark, among the bushes and trees, two people overhear things about themselves that force them to re-evaluate their lives. The next day, several of the party experience mishaps and personal humiliations, and by the end of the excursion all apart from Robin have met the fate that they most dread. In dealing with the disasters the whole group learn a great deal about themselves and their loved ones, and they return happier people.

Lady Althea shook her head. Pain she could have borne, but not this loss of pride, this misery of shame, the knowledge that in that one moment of biting the bread she had thrown away all grace, all dignity.

THIS STORY WAS SO FUCKING GOOD AND SO WELL CRAFTED. I'm obsessed with it. I love how everyone got what they had coming. And it was so fucking messy. Lady Althea loosing her fucking front teeth. The vicar hiding from Miss Dean whenever he sees her coming up the lane, her being convinced that he's half in love with her. Bob and Jill's young marital problems. Jim flirting with Jill, and later more than that. (Jim Forster, you will catch these hands.) Bob and Kate finding out. Miss Dean almost drowning in the church. Jim getting lost in a huge crowd despite his claustrophobia. Every single character is humiliated, humbled. Except for the innocent child Robin, of course. I LOVED it.

The Breakthrough (3 stars)
Stephen Saunders is sent to an isolated laboratory on the salt marshes of the East Coast to help out with a secret project. He is told that the laboratory is in need of an electrical engineer, but is given no other details. On arrival, Stephen discovers that he is expected to help operate the computer for an experiment to trap a human's vital spark, or psychic energy, at the point of death and prevent it from going to waste. The test subject is Ken, an affable young assistant who is dying of leukaemia.

As Ken lies on the point of death he is put under hypnosis along with Niki, a "backward child" whom the scientists have found to be susceptible. Niki is asked to 'stay with Ken' as his life ebbs away, and initially it seems that the experiment has been a success, with the instruments showing that Ken's energy has been captured. But after the point of death Niki, still under hypnosis, reports that Ken is asking the experimenters to let him go, and they realise that they may have captured more of Ken than his psychic energy. Horrified, they disconnect the apparatus and release the energy.

Definitely the most unlikely story of the bunch, as it's kinda sci-fi-esque. I didn't really care for it, tbh, but I applaud du Maurier for trying out different genres.