I first read Rebecca the summer between 8th and 9th grades…so coming out of middle school and going into high school.

Summer reading was always a chore and I figured that if it was on the school’s list of approved books it probably sucked. My mom, who read more by my age than I will ever read in my lifetime (probably), looked over the list and picked out Rebecca as “the best on the list.” So I read it as “the book that would suck least.”

I loved it. One of the joys of being a teenager is that your expectations are so ridiculously low for stuff that it usually turns out okay in the end, if not better than okay.

I loved the book. I loved the movie. Seriously, see the movie. It’s fairly true to the book and was fantastically casted. Alfred Hitchcock directed.

The author, Daphne DuMaurier, had written many books (I looked her up at the time), but I didn’t read anymore until college when I read My Cousin Rachel. This book was also a wonderful suspense novel full of twists and turns. I also read a short story collection of her popular works called Don’t Look Now, which contained a short story of the same name and her ridiculously famous short story called The Birds, which inspired the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name. Unlike Rebecca, The Birds film didn’t follow the original story much at all.

I have a number of other books by DuMaurier that I haven’t read yet, but I found a collection of short stories authored by her that were considered “lost.” They were early stories by her, published in magazines and never before reprinted, and as a fan of uncommon things, I naturally bought the book and started reading it almost immediately.

Short story collections always take me a long while to read though because when I’m absorbed in a novel, I’m absorbed until it’s over (if given the opportunity to continuously read). With short stories it’s more of a start and stop type deal, so I start, read the story, and then stop at the next one, not inclined to keep reading immediately.

This book was no exception. I started reading it in May on the train down to the city to meet a friend of mine for dinner (I remember because I pulled it out to show him), and finished it in July waiting for my mom outside the infusion room (another experience I vividly remember).

The fascinating thing about these earlier stories is that you can see a young DuMaurier (all these stories were written before she was 23) beginning to develop themes that run through her later books – romance, romance gone awry, obsession, heartbreak, etc… – but written with less detail (perhaps because the stories were shorter) and skill (much less subtle). Many of the stories were eerie – there was a story about the wind that brought a strange vessel to the shore of a sparsely populated island and the sailors aboard brought drinking and dancing and all kind of relatively strange behaviors to the island’s inhabitants. One married woman slept with one of the sailors, and the ship is gone by the next morning, as if they had come for the specific purpose of causing this kind of upheaval and bringing its consequences with the wind.

Another story had a man meet a woman who was obsessed with a doll. The man is, in turn, obsessed with the woman. Anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows that dolls are, by definition, creepy at best and psychotic killers at worst, so needless to say this story had a rather unhappy ending.

But not all the stories left you with the same haunted feeling of DuMaurier’s later works. One story had a couple of poor newlyweds trying to get laid ending up with opposite working schedules. Another had a man and woman “madly in love” go away or a weekend and realize they couldn’t stand each other.

Overall, I very much enjoyed and recommend these short stories. As someone who loves DuMaurier, it was fascinating reading these early tales, watching her develop as a writer. We don’t always get to see early stuff that shows an author growing into his/herself, and the opportunity to do it here, if you like DuMaurier (as I do), is not to be passed up.

Tagged: authors: daphne dumaurier, books gone hollywood, books: don't look now, books: my cousin rachel, books: rebecca, books: the doll: the lost short stories