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“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” That’s the immortal opening sentence of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 masterpiece. <\/p>\n
How often have I been lured in to both the novel and the 1940 Hitchcock film of Rebecca by that sentence? Is it an incantation? A curse? A virus that infects the imagination? Whatever mojo du Maurier conjured up in that sentence, its potency lingers. Perhaps, just by hearing it, you, too, have become spellbound.<\/p>\n
Rebecca dominates du Maurier’s legacy, but she wrote plenty of other macabre novels and short stories in her over 40-year-career. A new collection called After Midnight gathers together 13 of her stories, appropriately introduced by long-reigning Master of Horror, Stephen King.<\/a> 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” \u2014 a way to cope with existential dread by sampling it in small, potent sips.<\/p>\n 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 may already know what happens; but, it’s the slow, sinister unwinding of the how that makes these stories freshly transfixing.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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 du Maurier’s home turf of Cornwall. Like the Bront\u00eb sisters, whose Gothic legacy she carried forward explicitly in Rebecca, du Maurier was a master of describing weather: imbuing clouds, wind, rain \u2014 Mother Nature herself \u2014 with a sinister consciousness.<\/p>\n
![\"Ghost](\"https:\/\/media.npr.org\/assets\/img\/2013\/04\/17\/ghostshiponthewater_sq-9016db422986d082807a28d015399b799aacfb5b.jpg?s=100&c=85&f=jpeg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n![\"Does](\"https:\/\/media.npr.org\/assets\/img\/2020\/10\/21\/rebecca-01761_r_kerry-brown_netflix_sq-82ebf920b85e5da73ccb83549f9fad1f0361ae6e.jpg?s=100&c=85&f=jpeg\")
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