Maureen Corrigan

With so much to be nervous about in this world of ours, it may seem counterintuitive for me to recommend a collection that will only stir up more fear.

But think of these short stories as a kind of literary hair of the dog, a way to cope with existential dread by sampling it in small, potent sips.

starting with the familiar, may seem like a safer way to ease into the eerie world of du Maurier's short stories.

Not so.

You may think you're armored against the terror of the birds and don't look now if you've seen the classic films they inspired.

But you'd be mistaken.

Sure, some of us readers already know what happens.

But it's the slow, sinister unwinding of the how that makes these stories freshly transfixing.

And the settings in these stories register even more vividly as malevolent characters than they do in the films.

In Don't Look Now, all of Venice is a sinking, slimy, watery maze entrapping our main character, a smug but disoriented vacationer who only stumbles deeper into his appointment with a death foretold.

The short story of The Birds is set not in Hitchcock's Bodega Bay, but in Dumouriez's home turf of Cornwall.

Like the Brontë sisters, whose Gothic legacy she carried forward explicitly in Rebecca, du Maurier was a master of describing weather, imbuing clouds, wind, rain, Mother Nature herself with a sinister consciousness.

the birds opens in autumn with a sudden drop in temperature two days later we're told that at barely three o'clock a kind of darkness had already come the sky sullen heavy colorless like salt

the birds begin to amass growing more sentient by the hour here's the moment where our main character a farm hand named nat hoken realizes that he's not alone on the beach

he looked out to sea and watched the crested breakers combing green they rose stiffly curled and broke again then he saw them the gulls out there riding the seas

What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls.

Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.

They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the winds, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide.

The haywire weather and the birds gives it a weird up-to-dateness.

The same can be said of another story here, a standout, called The Breakthrough.