The Birds and Other Stories

A Cornish farmhand watches the birds around him stop behaving like birds, in the short novella that gave Hitchcock his second du Maurier film.

Why Consider This One

Choose The Birds and Other Stories if you want du Maurier’s other register: shorter, stranger, and closer to outright horror than her novels. The title story strips her usual concerns, an isolated setting, a slow build of dread, a sense that something ordinary has turned wrong, down to their essentials and compresses them into a single afternoon’s reading. It shares almost nothing with Rebecca on the surface, no grand house, no marriage, no long unreliable narration, but the same instinct for accumulating unease from small, precise details is unmistakably hers.

The five stories that accompany it show a wider range than the novels do: a jealous ghost, a professional photographer undone by his own camera, a young man drawn into something ancient in the mountains. None runs long enough to overstay its welcome, which makes this the collection to hand a reader who wants proof that du Maurier could unsettle you in twenty pages as easily as in four hundred.

What to Expect

Six self-contained stories, each readable in a single sitting, with “The Birds” the clear anchor and the reason most readers pick this collection up. The tone is colder and more overtly frightening than her novels, less concerned with romance and more with things going quietly, irreversibly wrong. At 256 pages it is the fastest way into du Maurier’s writing, and the shortest route to understanding why Hitchcock kept coming back to her.