This story doesn’t seem to have clicked with many reviewers but I quite liked it, even if it wasn’t my favourite. Anna disappears and Victor is heartbroken, but does that world really exist, what is its secret? Not what we were thinking certainly as we come to its surprise ending, and perhaps another story (like Lost Horizon) which captures that search for paradise in a world recovering from war. But eventually Victor convinces her to join him on expeditions, one of which take them to the mysterious Monte Verità, home of a secret community which has apparently found the secret to immortality. Anna seems a wonderful person but there is something very different about her including her very austere way of living and (for the narrator and Victor who are passionate mountaineers) her disinterest in climbing. Our narrator recounts the story of his old friend Victor who meets and marries the beautiful Anna (with whom the narrator falls in love himself). Next was the mysterious ‘Monte Verità’ (which gave me strong vibes of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon but of course told in Daphne Du Maurier’s way and with her own spin). The Birds Collectible Barbie (via pinterest) I liked that while this is straightforward horror, Du Maurier does give us that slight bit of ambiguity at the end leaving us to interpret the course the story will take. Soon it turns out that it isn’t only restlessness that the wind is inducing, for birds-little and big, innocuous and beautiful-suddenly turn on people, attacking, pecking, drawing blood, even breaking into homes! But what’s causing this and how will it end? I did catch on to the war parallel in the story (confirmed online later) but what makes the events of the story not only unsettling but truly terrifying is the danger coming from the everyday, from innocent creatures suddenly taking on a sinister, even monstrous colour, from which there seems no escape. The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry they must spill themselves of motion before the winter came.

When we meet him, autumn is just setting in and bringing the chilly east wind, but with it comes not only unpleasant weather but atmosphere that’s making all the birds around-sea and land-restless and uneasy: In the book though, this one tells of Nat Hocken, a farmhand who lives an ordinary life with his wife and two children, Jill and Johnny and works for the Triggs. I haven’t seen the film but it is clear that Hitchcock told it in his own version and interpretation. The opening story is the titular ‘The Birds’ which perhaps is the most familiar to readers as the base of the Hitchcock film.

Daphne du maurier the birds 1952