In the Land Of Not Quite Right

CHILLS Daphne du Maurier in 1946.IN HIS introduction to “After Midnight: Thirteen Tales for the Dark Hours,” Stephen King calls Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) “diabolical” and italicizes the word for good measure.What he is referring to is the way that the British author, who published most of these works in mass-market magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, deliberately messes with her readers' minds. Specifically, she never clarifies for us whether the threats faced by her characters are external and real, or whether they emanate from deep within themselves.You only have to think of “Rebecca” (1938), du Maurier’s celebrated full-length novel in which the narrator must decide whether the uncanny atmosphere at Manderley, the grand old house to which she has recently been installed as the second wife of the owner, is a manifestation of her predecessor's ghostly malevolence or of her own psychic disturbance. In du Maurier’s world, the usual footholds by which sanity is maintained are always in danger of being kicked away by circumstance.Alfred Hitchcock, who along with David O. Selznick turned “Rebecca” into an Oscar-winning film in 1940, also adapted one of the short stories in this collection. Du Maurier wrote “The Birds” in 1952, but the story differs strikingly from Hitchcock’s 1963 treatment. Du Maurier sets her tale in December, in agricultural Cornwall, one of the most desolate and isolated counties of England. Hitchcock transfers the action to sunny coastal California. Instead of Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren playing picture-perfect Mitch and Melanie, the original presents Nat Hocken, a disabled war veteran who works as a farm laborer, and whose wife remains a nameless domestic drudge.