“Don’t Look Now” (1970)

I was surprised to find this long story by Daphne du Maurier in The Weird, but that could be me more than Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, editors of the essential anthology. I still don’t know exactly what to think about du Maurier. I’ve never read Rebecca, but I read “The Birds” as a kid—it creeped me out so much I was subsequently afraid of the movie, which then scared me badly when I managed to see it a year or two later (against parental approval). As an adult, I read her strange and original time travel novel The House on the Strand from 1969, which is worth looking into. Perhaps because of Rebecca I think of her more as a romance writer—or, OK, maybe gothic. “Don’t Look Now” first appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, one of my favorite points about it. It has the smooth style of midcentury slick-page women’s magazine fiction too. There is a lot of disorienting cognitive dissonance with this one, at least for me. Nicolas Roeg, director of the impressive movie that came of this story, altered things a little. He made the husband an art restoration expert, whereas in the story he is only someone vaguely affluent on healing vacation with his wife. One confusing moment in the movie, a point I tended to miss, is much sharper here. It is actually the turning point of the story. This is when the husband sees his wife in a boat returning to Venice, when she had left for London earlier that day. She is with the mysterious elderly twins. The “weird” aspect here (I will conjecture, because I don’t always understand the VanderMeers’ critical genre distinctions) lies in the systematic way the couple is manipulated, not by the twins but by some force moving things around like pieces on a game board. It’s all more an elegant and refined type of horror—“restrained horror,” I sometimes call it. And the slick-page magazine tone can be hard to penetrate, with so much glossy surface. What is going on in this story? What are we supposed to make of the 30something couple who recently lost a child? Sympathy, obviously, reflexively. And what of the curious elderly twins, one of whom is blind and psychic? And the ending? It introduces a bizarre, unexpected element just at that point. Is it a cheat? Possibly, yes. But it works even so, as does the movie. Setting it in Venice is inspired and perfect—it works in a women’s magazine, it works as gothic, and it works as a Nicolas Roeg picture too.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
Listen to story online.

The House on the Strand (1969)

Now and then I think I might want to make a project of Daphne du Maurier, as much as anything because she wrote the original literary properties for a few Alfred Hitchcock movies, including Rebecca and The Birds. The House on the Strand, which is out of print as far as I can tell (and whatever that means exactly nowadays ... I found it online as a penny hardback), comes with an unusual twist on science fiction time travel, which I suppose is how I happened to get to it first. The twist is that time travel happens because of taking a drug, and essentially it's only the consciousness that actually travels as the physical body stays put in the present in something of a trance-like state, although it moves as the time traveler moves across the landscape of the past (and woe to you if something has been built there in the meanwhile). The theoretical basis is a lot of nonsensical argle-bargle, but never mind—that's as much feature as bug to me in the time travel subgenre, which I adore for itself. Unfortunately, in this novel, the 14th-century story that so fascinates our protagonist bore little interest for me, overpacked with tedious details of the long-ago characters  and their byzantine interrelations and intrigues. What I found more interesting was the nature of the drug use itself, which du Maurier facilely compares to LSD (no coincidence that the book was published in 1969, near the zenith of the drug's renown), terming the experiences "trips" and larding them out with various hallucinatory details. I wouldn't be surprised if du Maurier had done some experimenting of her own, though she was really most convincing to me on the patterns of addiction itself, never that much of a problem with the hallucinogen class, as far as I know. But in terms of the secretive way of living, the double life, compulsions, and the insanity of continuing to use in the face of undeniable dangers, her novel seems to me strikingly on the mark, and the most interesting aspect of it by far. It closes on something of a cheesy note, but there are moments here when one groans in empathetic horror at the choices and actions of our hero, which means it's not entirely without merit. Even so, overall, that's kind of a thin reed from which to hang things that are all too often boring, inconsequential, and way too outdatedly trendy. Proceed with caution.

In case it's not at the library.