litlover12

This post is for the British Invaders Blogathon at A Shroud of Thoughts.

Novelist Daphne du Maurier is best known for Gothic romances like Rebecca; her 1957 novel The Scapegoat -- part mystery, part thriller, part domestic drama -- though excellent, has largely flown under the radar. A recent BBC adaptation starring Matthew Rhys, which changed the setting from France to Britain and altered many other major elements of the story, brought some attention to it. But there's a previous version, a 1959 feature film directed by Robert Hamer and starring two of my favorite actors -- Alec Guinness and Bette Davis -- that I believe deserves to be much better known. (Hopefully, its release on DVD by Warner Archive will help with that!)
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So, I'm dying to buy The Paris Wife and The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels. But before I do, I really need to read some of the following, all currently on my shelves:

The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824. Beethoven's Letters. My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. Charles Dickens. Knowing Dickens. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution. Martin Chuzzlewit. Sketches by Boz. Mr. Dick or The Tenth Book. The Master's Cat: The Story of Charles Dickens as Told by His Cat. Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter. Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey. A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg. All but My Life. Sala's Gift. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The Complete Saki. Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. Walking on Water. Fly Fishing with Darth Vader. The Great Typo Hunt. Studies in Words. Reading Like a Writer. Mockingbird. The Glass-Blowers. Hide My Eyes. London Refrain. Full Dark House. The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton.  Havah. Almost Heaven. Resurrection. The Heart of the Artist. The Control Freak. Why Grace Changes Everything. God Hides in Plain Sight.

And that's not even all of them.

I need professional help.

Every time I read a book by Daphne du Maurier, mistress of the morbid, I wind up asking myself why I'm doing it. The woman scares the daylights out of me. Of course, some people like to be scared, but I don't. I have to really like the artistry of the person creating the work (a la Hitchcock or Shyamalan -- no, I'm still not over liking Shyamalan!) in order to let him or her freak me out.

And du Maurier's got artistry in spades, I have to give her that. The title story of the collection I just finished, "Don't Look Now," is clear evidence of that. One word -- just one word -- at the climax of the story hit me with such a cold shock of horror that I could hardly bear to finish. No, I won't say what the word was -- if you read the story, more than likely you'll know it when you get to it. At first there's something very strange and random about that ending . . . and then when you start thinking back through it, you see how the pieces fit together, and the cunning sleight of hand the author used to get you thinking in one direction while heading off in the other. A really well-crafted piece of work -- so well-crafted that I can't be sorry I read it, even though it gave me a tremor or two after getting into bed last night.

There were eight other stories in the book. Two of them I already had in another collection: "The Birds," which was the basis for the Hitchcock classic (even though Hitchcock changed it quite a lot), and "Monte Verita," which I've never liked much. I'm no "prosperity gospel" advocate, but sitting on a mountain gazing at your navel is not my ideal life of faith, especially not when -- well, I'd better not spoil that either. I didn't already have "Kiss Me Again, Stranger," but I know I've read it somewhere. It's probably one of those stories that gets anthologized a lot. Some of the other stories were pretty good but predictable. The one that really stood out to me was "Blue Lenses," which keeps twisting and turning right up till the very end, and is a stellar example of a theme that permeates du Maurier's work -- "that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain."

Several of du Maurier's stories remind me of this poem by Robert Frost, especially the line "What but design of darkness to appall?" It's not a worldview I can live with for very long, but it's a fascinating one nonetheless.