A Terrible Time for Birdwatching: Daphne Du Maurier s The Birds tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we cover Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds,” first published in her 1952 collection
The Apple Tree (now reprinted as
The Birds and Other Stories). Spoilers ahead. CW for (bird) suicide attacks and harm to eyes.
“Black and white, jackdaw and gull, mingled in strange partnership, seeking some sort of liberation, never satisfied, never still.”
Pensioned by disability from WWII, Nat Hocken works part-time at a farm on the Cornwall coast. He’s married with two young children, but has a solitary disposition. Middays he carries his lunch to cliffs overlooking the sea. In spring he watches the birds fly inland, purposeful, intent. In autumn those that don’t migrate are restless and uneasy. “And like people who, apprehensive of death before their time, drive themselves to work or foll