Editors Reads Verdict
These stories establish du Maurier as a master of the uncanny rather than merely the Gothic romance she is often reduced to — works of compressed, understated dread that refuse the explanations of horror and insist on the more disturbing fact of the inexplicable.
What We Loved
- The title story is a masterpiece of sustained dread — more disturbing than Hitchcock's film precisely because it refuses explanation
- The prose is compressed and controlled — du Maurier in short form is more precise than in her novels
- The collection demonstrates a range of uncanny effects that the Gothic romance label entirely misses
- The refusal of explanation in the best stories is a formal and philosophical choice, not a failure of resolution
Minor Drawbacks
- The collection is uneven — the weaker stories feel more conventional than the best ones
- Readers expecting Hitchcock will find the original more disturbing and less spectacular
- The short story form doesn't allow the landscape work that anchors du Maurier's novels
Key Takeaways
- → The truly uncanny refuses explanation — the moment the supernatural is explained, it becomes horror rather than dread
- → Ordinary life contains the conditions for violence; the birds are not an intrusion into normality but an expression of something always present in it
- → Du Maurier's range extends well beyond the Gothic romance she is known for — the uncanny is her deepest subject
- → Short fiction demands a different relationship to resolution than the novel form — incompleteness is not a flaw but a technique
| Author | Daphne du Maurier |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Virago |
| Pages | 304 |
| Published | January 1, 1952 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short Stories, Gothic Fiction, Horror |
The Birds and Other Stories Review
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds is one of the most famous horror films ever made, and it has done considerable damage to du Maurier’s reputation — not by being better than the story it is based on, but by being so different from it that readers who have seen the film first come to the original expecting something it deliberately refuses to provide. The film has a heroine, a romance, a San Francisco setting, a near-resolution in which the birds pause and survival seems possible. Du Maurier’s story has none of these things. It is set in rural Cornwall, its protagonist is a farmhand named Nat Hocken, and it ends with the birds still coming, the radio silent, the boarded-up farmhouse holding for now, and no suggestion that it will hold for long.
The refusal of explanation is the key. Hitchcock’s birds are disturbing partly because of the specific staging of the attacks — the schoolchildren running across the playground, the birthday party — but also partly because we sense, watching, that there is a cause we do not yet know, and the familiar apparatus of horror film (the explanation, the expert, the solution) will eventually arrive. Du Maurier’s birds have no cause and no explanation is offered. The east wind changes, and the birds attack. They continue to attack. There is no one who knows why, no information that could change what is happening, no agency available to the people in the farmhouse except to board up the windows and wait. This is a fundamentally different kind of dread from Hitchcock’s — less spectacular, more persistent, and considerably harder to put down.
The other stories in the collection demonstrate that “The Birds” is not an accident of mood but the expression of a consistent aesthetic. Du Maurier’s short fiction is interested in the uncanny as a mode distinct from the supernatural: not the intrusion of the impossible into the everyday, but the revelation that the everyday always contained something wrong that the characters had been not seeing. “Don’t Look Now” — perhaps her greatest story — works through this mechanism with extraordinary control: the grief at its centre is entirely realistic, the Venice setting is entirely realistic, and the horror, when it arrives, is not a departure from psychological realism but an expression of it.
The collection as a whole establishes du Maurier as a writer whose deepest imaginative territory was not the Gothic romance of country houses and doomed loves — though she was very good at that — but the experience of the world becoming suddenly, irreversibly strange. The strangeness in these stories is never resolved, never explained, and never domesticated. It simply remains, after the final page, which is exactly the effect du Maurier was after.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Birds and Other Stories" about?
The title story — in which birds throughout England turn on the human population without warning or explanation — gave Hitchcock one of his greatest films. But du Maurier's original is more disturbing than the movie: the birds are never explained and the ending refuses resolution.
What are the key takeaways from "The Birds and Other Stories"?
The truly uncanny refuses explanation — the moment the supernatural is explained, it becomes horror rather than dread Ordinary life contains the conditions for violence; the birds are not an intrusion into normality but an expression of something always present in it Du Maurier's range extends well beyond the Gothic romance she is known for — the uncanny is her deepest subject Short fiction demands a different relationship to resolution than the novel form — incompleteness is not a flaw but a technique
Is "The Birds and Other Stories" worth reading?
These stories establish du Maurier as a master of the uncanny rather than merely the Gothic romance she is often reduced to — works of compressed, understated dread that refuse the explanations of horror and insist on the more disturbing fact of the inexplicable.
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