In the morning, the birds act normally again and Nat’s brutality upsets him: “ Dawn, and the open window, had called the living birds the dead lay on the floor. One night, small birds attack his children in their room, pecking at their eyes until he can fight them off. The protagonist is Nat, a farmhand who lives in a house on the beautiful Cornish coast with his wife and two children. This is the very first story, and it really sets the bar high for the rest of the collection, with dark undertones of the reality of a world war. “The birds! They just birded a man to death…”

And it’s not because of the movie or the fact that THIS exists. There wasn’t a single story in here which I didn’t like – but there were three that are still haunting me, weeks after reading it. This might actually be my favorite short story collection of all time, which is saying something considering that ‘The opposite of loneliness’ by Marina Keegan, ‘Any other mouth’ by Annaliese Mackintosh, and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by the legend that is Edgar Allan Poe exists. This is particularly interesting given the way Du Mourier “explained to a trusted few people her own unique slant on her sexuality: her personality comprised two distinct people – the loving wife and mother (the side she showed to the world) and the lover (a “decidedly male energy”) hidden from virtually everyone and the power behind her artistic creativity.” She also mentioned that she wished to have been born a boy – such details which make me as a queer reader, all the more interested. Unlike many of them, however, especially in this short story anthology, she writes from the first-person view of a man. She was, as so many female writers from the late 19th and early 20th century were, mystifying and fascinating. Daphne herself, taken sometime in the 1930s

The birds daphne