“It was three months after she died that he first noticed the apple tree.” This is how Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 story “The Apple Tree” begins. Readers familiar with her most read work, Rebecca, are attuned to du Maurier’s classic first sentences. There are a few writers who have been able to set the tone of their stories from the get-go. Born in 1907, Daphne du Maurier was dismissed by critics when she published her early works. It was only in the 1940s that du Maurier rose to fame and her narrative style was taken seriously. Master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock even adapted Rebecca for the screen.

Virago Modern Classics has put together Daphne du Maurier’s major short stories and novellas into a massive book that runs for 600 pages in a brand new collection titled After Midnight. It carries a luring introduction by Stephen King and has endorsements from some major writers of paranormal stories like Camilla Grudova, Sarah Waters, and Sarah Perry. The collection comprises the most well-known ones like “The Birds”, “Don’t Look Now”, “Not After Midnight” as well as those that have been lost to the readers since their publication, like “The Doll” and “The Breakthrough”. All stories are tied by one thread, and that is: they are creepy, gothic and bizarre.

It would be a failed attempt to review this collection. Where does one begin? And to what extent can a review capture the vastness of each of the stories? Perhaps what I may do is tell you what I experienced reading these stories and how I found myself as each story came to a close and a new one began.

The stories

Humour is essential to du Maurier and she makes that aptly clear from the very first story, “The Blue Lenses”. We are let into a hospital where a woman is going to have a pair of lenses fitted in her eyes that will help her see again. But what Marda West sees is equal parts scary and hilarious. She sees the gentle nurse walk around with the head of a cow, the doctor as a fox terrier, and her husband as a vulture ready to prey on her immobile cadaver. Across the stories, humour has been woven into the paranormal to draw the reader into the narrative with seriousness and an effort to make the stories livelier. In “The Alibi”, we see a middle-aged man losing grip with his wife and everything associated with the ordinary life he has carved for himself. On a whim, he chooses to rent a room in a basement and paint under the false name of his father-in-law. The owner of the house is a destitute migrant woman with a child left by her husband. She makes a move on the man, and soon the affair leads to a disaster.

While I found myself giggling through these stories, what truly remained with me was being in awe of du Maurier’s craft. In what emerged as one of my favourite stories, “The Apple Tree”, she describes the tree thus: “The blossom was too thick, too great a burden for the long thin trunk, and the moisture clinging to it made it heavier still.” It is the portrait of the narrator’s failed marriage, his wife, who had just died and had given her life over to chores and a set of domestic duties. I was awestruck, to say the least, by the sheer ingenuity with which she employs descriptions, images, and metaphors to give life to the characters’ inner world. I found myself remembering Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 2013. Munro is regarded as one of the masters of the short-story form in the English-speaking world. In her stories, set in Ontario and the Canada of the 20th century and before, she uses a variety of elements in her settings to make her characters more believable. One could guess it to be a difficult feat to spend words in such a little space describing furniture, cars, a shed, a canal, a tree or a room but du Maurier and Munro’s prose excel in that. They care little for the limitations of a short story and are liberal with its definition. Most of the stories in this collection run over fifty pages or more. The same is the case with Munro. The stories are too long for a short story and too short for a novel. Its beauty, perhaps, lies in its indefinability.

It is my suggestion to the reader to not read the collection like I did in four days. Now that I have read all of the stories, I would suggest really taking one’s time and reading them over a course of a few days. As for me, I had become obsessed. I read with breathlessness and the mania to unearth the truth. But do I know the truth still? It is a question that kept me afloat as I finished one story and moved on to the next. The truth I was seeking kept getting away like the apparitions of the child and his wife that keep escaping a man in one of the stories in this book.

“Don’t Look Now: is a story that follows a couple getting over the grief of a dead child. The couple is in Venice on holiday but find themselves caught in a fix when a pair of psychics tell Laura that their daughter is right next to them, laughing. The story’s tension mounts when Laura has to suddenly leave for London but John is convinced that she is still in Venice. John gets obsessed with following the sites where he found his dead daughter laughing, and with his wife hiding from him, he comes undone. I do not know about John, but I failed to grasp the truth (if there was any in the stories). Instead, I chose to understand it.

Reading becomes that: understanding life and its vagaries rather than getting to the life as such. Jhumpa Lahiri has perfected this narrative style in her short stories; most recently, Roman Stories, which was one of my best books of 2023. Lahiri takes us into Rome through a wide array of characters and their life stories as they pursue what makes them human: love, art, money, belongingness, independence and alienation. Daphne du Maurier makes a concerted effort to explore each of these but through the narrative lens of the paranormal. Unlike Lahiri, who sees the everyday as a battle in its realism, du Maurier expands the dimensions of the everyday to include the dead, the nonhuman, and those invisible to human comprehension.

The moods

In one of the longest stories in this book, “Monte Verità”, comparable in length to a novella, du Maurier explores that which is invisible yet alive to human comprehension more concretely. We follow a love triangle of sorts where two friends who love mountaineering end up loving the wife of one. The unnamed narrator is fatally in love with Anna, his friend Victor’s wife. On one mountaineering trip, Anna disappears in the Monte Verità, a monastery that takes young women under their tutelage. Nobody knows the way in, and no members ever return to reality once they step into this seemingly utopian community. Anna says, “This isn’t madness, or hypnotism, or any of the things you imagine it to be…This thing is so much stronger than most people…There can be no other life for me, anymore, ever.” Both the readers and the characters remain befuddled by this spiritual comprehension of life that Anna pursues.

The pattern that stood out to me, and remarkably so, is that du Maurier has resorted to the male point of view (mostly middle-aged) in ten out of 13 stories in the volume. The most entertaining of them was “Ganymede”, which is a parallel to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Here, we follow a middle-aged gay man who is smitten by a young Italian man and is ready to put himself under extreme economic and mental pressure to get a moment with him. Similarly, in “Not After Midnight”, we follow a prep-school teacher who’s come to a sea-town in Greece to paint but finds himself curiously following a couple who he thinks may be involved in murdering the man in whose room he now stays. In both stories, tragedies strike men who are almost about to reach a consensus with life – and yet I could not help but gasp with delight. This delight had little to do with the curious reader in me, but more to do with the student in me who wants to ace the nuances of writing such captivating fiction.
This book is meant for every kind of reader; it is bound to impress all. The republication comes at an urgent time when literary fiction and the short story form seem to lose their hold over the readers. It is also a reminder that literary fiction, or stories written in this genre, need not always be without some form of experimentation with the world of the uncertain. There is always space for a laugh, a scare, and an active imagination that can run through a genre that has now become infamous to be crammed with too many ideas and less life in those ideas.

Rahul Singh is an academic and a writer based in Kolkata.

After Midnight: Thirteen Chilling Tales for the Dark Hours, Daphne du Maurier, Virago.

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