Since this is a collection I’m going to give this an overall ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ stars but also rate each of the stories individually.

Thank you to NetGalley and little brown book publishing for giving me this copy to read.

What I loved about these stories is that they all have potential for people to gather individual options over the characters and their stories. Each story is unique yet has such horrifying and haunting elements to it. Definitely a perfect spooky collection and I’m so glad I finally read it!

The birds
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines!’

Terrifying, I’ve never been one who is scared of birds but after reading this story I completely understand how they hold the potential to be something from a nightmare. They are such delicate and regal creatures but if their instincts changed and they chose to fight against us, the havoc and power they could possess is so frightening.

Monte verità

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘As the moon rose, the man that climbed with it shrank to insignificance. I was no longer aware of personal identity. This shell, in which I had my being, moved forward without feeling, drawn to the summit of the mountain by some nameless force which seemed to hold suction from the moon itself.’

I found this story very interesting and thought provoking. It made me consider the strength and beauty of nature being its own force and how in comparison we are at its mercy if it wants to claim us. But more importantly that it is up to us whether we wish to surrender ourselves to nature or remain boxed off in our civilisations. The lure and spectacles around Monte Verità made it so magical yet eerie, yet I still find myself wanting to find my own Monte Verità. That being said, du Maurier raises the concept that even paradise has its flaws and diseases, so it is really something we should idolise? It definitely gave me similar vibes to du Maurier’s ‘my cousin Rachel’ which I also loved and I wonder if writing that helped to inspire this since they were released within a year of one another.

The apple tree

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘Death should be different. It should be like bidding farewell to someone at a station before a long journey, but without the strain.’

This story dives into marital struggles and the impact of infidelity. It follows a man who is settling into life following the death of his wife however, he starts to feel haunted by the presence of the old apple tree, symbolic of his wife. He wants desperately to destroy the tree to regain his peace. The presence of a younger more fruitful tree reminds him of his infidelity and guilt.

I found this story really interesting, it is clear the widower is doing his best to find fault and criticise his late wife but she consumes his thoughts and while he is critical he can’t help but remember all her daily tasks and quirks which he is maybe realising her value much too late. I think the story is about him realising his failures in his marriage and he is being filled with regret while trying to defect these feelings onto the deceased midge and is desperate to erase her from his thoughts to hide from his own guilt.

The little photographer

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘Life was one long sequence of resting, of getting up, and of resting again. Because with her pallor, with her reserve, they thought her delicate’

Since marrying Madam la Marquise has grown bored of her life,being consumed in her husbands world with his family, she longed for excitement and to meet new people. She wants admiration. She has a grand lifestyle yet has no fulfilment or excitement in it which leads her to an affair with a photographer. While that disrupts the monotony of her everyday life, it soon falls into her routine and loses its excitement leading her to feel incomplete once again. Soon the affair turns sour.

This story was fun another one where I both hated and liked the main character. I was rooting for her to fine some excitement in her monotonous life however her actions and choices were very self centred which swayed me away from liking her.

Kiss me again, stranger

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

‘They'd got her. About three o'clock in the afternoon. I didn't read the writing, nor the name nor anything. I sat down on my bed, and took up the paper, and there was my girl staring up at me from the front page.’

Starting this one I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. It felt like a ghost story yet had no ghosts. I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen but I was very wrong! The main character becomes enamoured with a woman he meets working at a movie theatre. The woman is mysterious and has lots of her own baggage. This one was interesting as du Maurier explores men’s perceptions of women following the war and how the war altered these perceptions. It was very thought provoking for such a short story while also having an interesting plot.

The old man

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘It was both a requiem and a benediction. An atonement, and a giving of praise. In their strange way they knew they had done evil, but now it was over, because I had buried Boy and he was gone.’

This one really caught me off guard in the best possible way. It was like having a chat with a new friend who is spilling some gossip and some dark gossip at that. The narrator tells the story of the old man, his wife and children as he watches them across a lake. At first it was a little creepy to see this persons fascination and fondness for the family. I don’t want to give it away but the story had me stressed, nervous, sad and frustrated. The plot twist I definitely didn’t see coming and it definitely enhanced the story making it my favourite from this collection and definitely a brilliant one to finish the collection with.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publishers and of course the author for gifting me this advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.


I am a die hard Daphne Du Maurier fan and she is an author like no other. I was so pleased to receive this copy which was a perfect book to read over the halloween period.

I’m a huge du Maurier fan but have never read any of her short stories, and I’ve never even seen the film version of The Birds.

This book includes 6 short stories, which are all very different but all have a gothic theme. The final story (The Old Man) was my least favourite to begin with because it was quite slow, but then it had an ending that came from absolutely nowhere!

With thanks to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group UK for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book as I love most of what I've read by Daphne Du Maurier. She had a real gift for writing completely believable characters and putting them in sinister, haunting and genuinely disturbing settings.

In this collection my favourite is The Apple Tree. I could read it over and over again. The premise is that a husband has recently lost his wife, and becomes haunted by an apple tree in his garden that seems to eerily resemble her. I absolutely love the descriptions of Midge, the long-suffering and now dead wife. Her behaviour is so recognisable that I would think every reader must have come across someone like this. On the surface she seems utterly irritating - never satisfied, never happy, constantly nitpicking about things and making clear that she isn't happy while never directly saying what she actually wants.

It's infuriating, and we can see how the husband was driven slightly mad by it. But then, we hear about how she was when they first married. How she seemed to have expectations of how their relationship would be and how very easily he destroyed those expectations and paid no heed to what she actually wanted or needed. Then, I start to sympathise with Midge and understand how she ended up being the bitter and unhappy woman that she was when she died.

The strength of it is that it reads so easily, this description of their relationship while meanwhile the madness with the apple tree is ongoing and it's not clear if he's actually going mad or if Midge somehow IS haunting him via the tree. Absolutely brilliant.

I also really enjoyed The Little Photographer and The Old Man. Both have the same type of descriptions of dysfunctional, frustrating relationships but with a particular unexpected twist in the last one.

This is a great collection for anyone who loves creepy, unsettling, well written tales.

A great book to get a feel for Du Maurier's writing. Beautiful prose with sumptuous detailing, I couldn't get enough. Now I'm going to reread Rebecca.

A collection to unsettle

This re-issue of stories initially published in 1952 under the title of one of the other stories, The Apple-Tree comes with a fine introduction by David Thomson. Unlike many introductions it can be read before the stories themselves, as it mainly recounts the history of du Maurier’s stories and novels which were adapted into films. Hitchcock of course features, and it was his film of the short story which gives the re-issue its present title, which pushed du Maurier’s story into reaching a much wider audience.

Hitchcock of course, changed the story of an isolated Cornish community into a Californian setting. Film and story stand differently, both splendidly formed as themselves

It was a real pleasure to re-read these stories. With The Birds, which inevitably is painted over in my mind by the Hitchcock visuals, I really appreciated, as I often do, the wonderful rhythms of du Maurier’s writing.
She paints such clear visuals, crisply, poetically, menacingly, and with wonderful spareness.

There are 6 stories here, and each, in a quite different way, builds a sense of something brooding, dangerous, not quite right. Sometimes the malevolence is of something supernatural, sometimes something all too human.

Each story, in its own way, is a gem. I did particularly like the present and previous title stories, and the final story, The Old Man, which does not fully reveal itself until the final paragraph.

This is a particularly fine collection to read or re-read as the nights lengthen………………..

It was great to read the classic The Birds and to read more stories by Daphne. Definitely recommend this!

I haven't read this since I was a teenager and like all good writing, it changes as you get older. (Quite a bit older!) This is a classic collection of gothic / weird fiction that plumbs the depths of the human psyche and generally leaves you with a sense of unease, as if you're not seeing what's really there when you look at reality. There's so much more underneath. Knowing more about the author now, and having a lot more life experience, I picked up on themes in these stories that passed me by at 13. In the Birds, for example, there's a definite bisexual feel to the MC which Hitchcock )probably accidentally) included in his film. Overall this was a welcome reread, perfect for the spooky season.