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in calculating my enjoyment of this collection, i might have made a mathematical error. there are six stories in this collection, and i only disliked one of them. granted, the one i disliked was the longest story, which gives it more negative weight, but my love of the last story was so great that i think i shall round this up to four stars.

there.

since there are only six stories, it is not a trial for me to review them separately.

The Birds

yeah, we've all seen the movie.



but du maurier's story is completely different, except for the central premise fact that birds are evil. hers is a much more pastoral story, where the action revolves around one family's attempts to keep the aggressive birds out of their house, but the attacks are of course much wider-reaching. it's terrifically tense with the window-pecking and chimney-invading, and the family's attempts to turn their small home into a fortress in the small windows of opportunity between massive bird-invasions. goddamn birds.

Monte Verita

this is the one i thought was barf. it starts out promising but it just goes on and on and then gets all weird and flaky with all that ineffable imagery that i find so tedious in authors like lovecraft. this story made me really grouchy.

The Apple Tree

this one is darkly comic with an unlikeable, unreliable narrator recently widowed and glad of it. finally he is free to do as he pleases, living like a bachelor without the pesky sighing martyrdom of his wife invading his relaxing space with her relentless housework and negative attitude. but there's this apple tree, see, and it is starting to remind him of her - dauntlessly clinging to life, keeping the other, younger, prettier trees in its shadow, producing fruit that everyone else finds pleasant but tastes rancid in his mouth. and he starts to HATE that tree. it starts to haunt his every waking moment and ruin his peace of mind. and he is going to have to do something about it. this is a great slow-burning character study of a man who is bitterly angry with limited self-awareness. man vs tree - who will win?

The Little Photographer

this is another great character study, with a fantastic shift in readerly loyalty. it concerns a beautiful, lonely marquise left to her own devices on holiday with her two young daughters while her husband tends to his business needs. she married an older man for the glamor of his title, but has found that it is not at all as rewarding as she had imagined, and is a very shallow existence of keeping up appearances and tedious public engagements. she envies her friends with their romantic dalliances and the freedom they have in their unscrutinized lives, and decides to take advantage of her unsupervised situation by having an affair with a young awestruck photographer whom she uses for the physical pleasures while treating him with indifference and lording her social superiority over him. but when he starts to get a little clingy, she has to protect herself, right?

Kiss Me Again, Stranger

a young man falls hard for an enigmatic beauty with some serious baggage. it has the feeling of a ghost story without any actual ghosts, and it a fantastic cautionary tale about finding out some details about a lady before you go getting all starry-eyed. pretty girls make graves and all.

The Old Man

oh, man. i am not going to say anything about this story except that du maurier blew my everlovin' mind with this one. COMPLETELY caught by surprise. i was reading it and going "blah blah blah - why do i care about this situation??" and the OUT OF NOWHERE she yanked the rug out from under me, and i fell in love with her. best way to end a story collection ever.

so, yes. four stars for the collection, no stars for that mountain-story, and one million stars for that last story.

this is math.