Don't Look Now and Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Daphne du Maurier had many gifts as a writer. She was blessed with a prose style that purred like a contented cat curled up by a warm fireside; she had a rare ability to pitch convincing narratives from both a male and a female perspective and she could create atmosphere like few other authors of her generation. And yet, above and beyond everything else, what for me makes her work genuinely unique, and genuinely great, was her imagination, her ability to come up with plots and stories that were, quite simply, darker and more sinister than those anyone else could have dreamt of. This air of the macabre and sinister is perhaps shown to its best effect in her short stories, here character and plot are necessarily restricted and what we are left with is often raw, pure, deliciously unsettling atmosphere. There are five stories in this collection - all of them excellent and all told with her characteristic style, wit and insight - but it is the first ('Don't Look Now') and the last ('The Breakthrough') which show Daphne's ability with the dark and the gothic at its most devestating.

The title story concerns a grieving couple, Laura and John, attempting to begin their lives again following the death of their daughter. They take a vacation in Venice and drift through a rain-shrouded landscape in which their wrong-turnings and frequent habit of becoming lost amongst the side-streets and canals of the city mirrors their emotional doubts and uncertainties. Into this haunted, opaque world enter two elderly ladies - one of whom is blind but gifted (or cursed) with second-sight - who may, or may not, be as amiable as they seem and a small figure in red who flitters about, always on the periphery, always glimpsed briefly and then moving out of view. The set up is so loaded with enigmatic strangeness that in the hands of a lesser writer the whole thing would have fallen apart but such was du Maurier's skill she manages to construct a wonderfully poisonous little tale which continually frustrates expectations. Just when you think you know where it is heading she removes the rug from under your feet and the picture you're left with is oh so much darker than you had previously imagined. 'Don't Look Now' really is a scary little tale. One of the few stories I've ever read that left me feeling uneasy, alone, worried about what I might glimpse from the corner of my eye....

The tale that ends the collection - 'The Breakthrough' - is again bewitchingly strange. A small group of scientists holed up in a bleak little establishment perched on a dreary expanse of coastline conduct experiments into capturing the essence of life and storing it at the moment of death. Again, as with 'Don't Look Now', the elements of the tale - a young man with a terminal illness; a machine which can induce a trance-like state and a small girl with latent psychic abilities - are all a touch disturbing and the atmosphere du Maurier creates is genuinely unsettling. The story reminded me of Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan' - another tale of scientific transgression and the unleashing of forces which would have been better left dormant.

Daphne du Maurier was such a unique talent, someone who combined the gifts you would expect of a talented writer with a unique and brilliantly dark imagination. All of the stories in this collection are fascinating (the second, in which a painter meets a couple while on holiday and is invited up to visit them but 'not after midnight' is a terrific example of how to hold the reader's attention with a baffling and enigmatic set-up) but it is the first and the last that, for me, show why Daphne du Maurier was such a gifted writer. Both tales are very clever, and very, very dark.

I was really quite diappointed with this. I'm afraid I feel Don't Look Now makes a better film than a short story. I don't think Daphne du Maurier is actually very good at dialogue. The conversation between the couple is very stilted and dated and doesn't really ring true. I really wanted to like it as I know it is a classic and ceratinly the synopsis sounds good but I really feel it falls short. I felt short changed once I'd finished, I kept waiting to feel spooked but it just didn't come. The evil protagonist at the end just seemed a bit daft, much more spooky in the film. It may be a bit controversial but occasionally stories are actually better once translated into film. I read this for my book club and I'll be interested to hear what the others thought. I know at least one other who felt thoroughly underwhelmed. I feel relieved and cleansed to be able to say it out loud!

An engaging collection of short stories from Daphne Du Maurier that does much to commend the short story format to those (like me) who aren't always convinced by them.

The stories here are quite long, so you only get five of them, but they all pack a punch in different ways, and span quite different genres of writing, from suspense and black humour to science fiction. What impresses is that Du Maurier is equally convincing across these different themes, and writes very well either as a female or male lead narrator.

Some of the stories are quite risque for the time, hinting at quite dark, sensuous themes in places, with a directness of style that I wasn't quite expecting. They are well-crafted page turners, often leading the reader down blind alleys or wrong turns, before delivering a significant punch at the end.

Certainly an entertaining and stylish collection - I'd read another collection in this vein.