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Post by dem on Jun 26, 2021 9:20:06 GMT
 Michael Foreman The AlibiAlso available in the attractive ilustrated edition of Classics Of The Macabre (Guild, 1987) |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jun 26, 2021 10:58:28 GMT
Michael Foreman The Alibi Also available in the attractive ilustrated edition of Classics Of The Macabre (Guild, 1987) Thanks. The stories in THE BREAKING POINT, her darkest book? THE ALIBI THE BLUE LENSES GANYMEDE THE POOL THE ARCHDUCHESS THE MENACE THE CHAMOIS THE LORDLY ONES |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jun 26, 2021 11:56:19 GMT
Michael Foreman The Alibi Also available in the attractive ilustrated edition of Classics Of The Macabre (Guild, 1987) Thanks. The stories in THE BREAKING POINT, her darkest book? THE ALIBI THE BLUE LENSES GANYMEDE THE POOL THE ARCHDUCHESS THE MENACE THE CHAMOIS THE LORDLY ONES Du Maurier is pretty dark all of the time. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jun 30, 2021 15:51:58 GMT
THE POOL by Daphne du Maurier
The turnstile woman, the author herself, I guess.
The gradual turning of style from children’s story to horror?
Has anyone else read this story.
My full review below —
THE POOL
“Deborah, still on her knees and crossing her hands once more, edged her way to the brink of the pool and then, crouching there beside it, looked down into the water. Her reflection wavered up at her, and it was not the face she knew, not even the looking-glass face which anyway was false, but a disturbed image, dark-skinned and ghostly. The crossed hands were like the petals of the water-lilies themselves, and the colour was not waxen white but phantom green. The hair too was not the live clump she brushed every day and tied back with ribbon, but a canopy, a shroud. When the image smiled it became more distorted still. Uncrossing her hands, Deborah leant forward, took a twig, and drew a circle three times on the smooth surface. The water shook in ever widening ripples, and her reflection, broken into fragments, heaved and danced, a sort of monster, and the eyes were there no longer, nor the mouth.”
That ‘looking-glass’ face again of the woman in the du Maurier’s Blue Lens, and her Alibi woman, too, reflected in this pool that we meet in a children’s story if not FOR children.
Deborah being a symbol of these women, now in waiting, and given her chance for an explicitly Christian religious healing, a cleansing epiphany — or a potential grievous subsumption? Otherwise, she is part of a story like Narnia or E. Nesbit or Sarban’s Calmahain or this story’s own “monster tree” to match a more recent book (‘A Monster Calls’ by Patrick Ness) that I happened, as if by destiny, to review a few days ago.
This is a du Maurier story, however, that seems to be the darkest side of Elizabeth Bowen as blended with some D.H. Lawrence short stories, whereby we now see the garden and its pool explicitly lurking in wait for the children to stay with their grandparents there. Although that sense of the garden’s thus waiting, its sumner house et al, starts off indeed as an idyllic story for children, about Deborah and her brother Roger playing cricket and having a bath together and listening to Grandma read aloud Black Beauty … until the words start to possess Deborah on one of her night visits to the pool and she later petulantly throws a knife at Roger, then there is the heat wave and eventually the storm. And the woman at the turnstile…with a key to a secret world.
Meanwhile, I wonder who persuaded du Maurier to add the very short ending coda of chapter 4, to soften the blow?
Some amazingly powerful stylistic writing here. Blew me away. Although some passages as well as the general denouement are arguably inchoate.
“…this isn’t a dream. And it isn’t death, either. It’s the secret world.”
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 1, 2021 13:55:37 GMT
THE ARCHDUCHESS by Daphne du Maurier
“Why ravish a stranger, when my sister is my bride?”
Ronda, a utopia of incestuous intermarriages, its trade in fishbones arched like bra cups for breasts, and Rovlvula flowers turned into beauty cream, and its spring waters of elixir for eternal life, beautiful Rondese women, too, with intoxicated caresses, and a hint of a means to prolong not only life but also the act of love. …………
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Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on Jul 1, 2021 14:06:25 GMT
THE ARCHDUCHESS by Daphne du Maurier “Why ravish a stranger, when my sister is my bride?” Ronda, a utopia of incestuous intermarriages, its trade in fishbones arched like bra cups for breasts, and Rovlvula flowers turned into beauty cream, and its spring waters of elixir for eternal life, beautiful Rondese women, too, with intoxicated caresses, and a hint of a means not only to prolong life but also the act of love. ………… Very good. |
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Post by PeterC on Jul 1, 2021 15:16:25 GMT
I find Daphne Du Maurier's stories intriguing but lacking a certain 'bite' - I have the same problem with Joyce Carol Oates' stories.
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 1, 2021 15:32:04 GMT
THE ARCHDUCHESS by Daphne du Maurier “Why ravish a stranger, when my sister is my bride?” Ronda, a utopia of incestuous intermarriages, its trade in fishbones arched like bra cups for breasts, and Rovlvula flowers turned into beauty cream, and its spring waters of elixir for eternal life, beautiful Rondese women, too, with intoxicated caresses, and a hint of a means to prolong not only life but also the act of love. ………… Very good. “— he smells his last Rovlvula flower, that heady blossom whose golden petals cover the streets in late summer…” — Daphne du Maurier |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 3, 2021 17:08:05 GMT
THE MENACE by Daphne du Maurier “I’ve lost my rib.” An alternate world story where a British actor called Barry from Herne Bay grows up to be a very big film star in Hollywood, the archetypal strong and silent type, with a suitably located small facial scar, an inscrutable heartthrob called The Menace — porridge loving, eventually experimenting his fancies successfully with rice pudding, after donating spam to us in Britain during the hard days of the war. Strong and silent, but with his own genuine lack of emotions that suited the parts he played. Until, in 1959, the cinema industry brought out ‘feelies’, with similar teething problems affecting already established actors as had been the case with the earlier invention of ‘talkies’. Barry’s ‘feely’ force field turns out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, extremely low, thus threatening his career. His wife is scuttled off for the weekend while his minders take him to a beach where they trust to stir his loins with “coloured boys and girls”, none of them over 17, provocatively in “nude parade”. When that doesn’t work (he refers to them with the N word), the minders take him to a night club with other provocations for his loins, more stiffeners for his sinews. It is here he meets by chance an old female friend back home from Herne Bay who once failed a film test in Hollywood, now a grey-haired lavatory attendant…one with memories of home and the old days. I will not let on the results of this meeting, but I found the ending predictable. The story’s moral? Its context with the rest of this book’s gestalt? Your guess is as good as mine. But my guess is that it’s an alibi for another story. Think about it. (Or a counterpart for Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 gorilla story?) |
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 4, 2021 15:53:23 GMT
Two remarkable stories by Daphne du Mauurier… THE CHAMOIS and THE LORDLY ONES The first with a terrifying sense of Algernon Blackwood and the second is just simply remarkable!! THE CHAMOIS “All this came true, but something was amiss. There was a flaw – not only the non-appearance of children, but a division of the spirit. The communion of flesh which brought us together was in reality a chasm, and I despised the bridge we made. Perhaps he did as well. I had been endeavouring for ten years to build for my self a ledge of safety.“ …and that ‘bridge’ between these two Sibelius lovers eventually became a dangerous gap in the Northern wilds of Greece between them, across which the woman narrator tries to rescue her bumptious husband who had by now become like a scared deer in the headlights of a car. The husband, with an already well-stocked trophy room, is obsessed with hunting the inscrutably rare chamois about which animal I here learnt a lot. And the goatherd guide called Jesus, so similar to the Menace of Barry with the latter’s lack of emotions and staged inscrutability, yet the goatherd is so different, so unstaged? The description of Jesus’ eyes is unsurpassable. And he is shot by mistake by her husband, if that is not a spoiler the nature of which has now shot the reader! But not a mistake at all? Willed by the narrator when mis-storifying us about it? This is a classic story, no mistake. Another Algernon Blackwood weird tale of deserved note, with something Maurier more. A car’s “chassis” (in assonance with ‘chamois’) steered by a wall-eyed driver that takes them along lethal hairpin bends over chasms towards the perhaps too rare chamois, and the husband, having taken a cloth from his pouch, meaningfully polishes his rifle at the end before he aims and fires it, as if this story in 1959 knew what chamois leather cloths were used for! And perhaps it did. And ‘pork-ham’ to echo Barry’s spam. A cupboard to sleep in. Giddiness and fear outside. Unmissable. “, it was as though our last link with sanity had snapped.” *** Little Ben is shut away in a cupboard, too, at the beginning…. And someone had an ‘evil-smelling cloth to wipe his mouth’, to wipe out any sick. THE LORDLY ONES
“Because of his silence they forgot to explain things to him, arrivals and departures and changes of plan,…” The exquisite story of Ben, a neuro-diverse boy, although his parents, like all parents, when this story was published, would never have understood that. The father dealt out cruel corporal punishment to him, instead, and his mother allowed a candle to ‘flounce her figure to a grotesque shape.’ They took him from the city of Exeter one day, amid confusion and without warning, to a smaller house on the thinly populated moors. With a bedroom where he had not yet worked out its shape and nature before darkness set in. Thus moved to the moors, he somehow got mixed up with such moors as people, and indeed so might I have done at his age, not realising that words can mean two different things at once, and he ran away with this roaming clan of what he deemed to be ‘lordly ones making towards the hills’, and to whom he had taken his parents’ own meagre food to help them, and he is now with a beautiful golden-haired woman as his mother who allows him to be breast-fed by herself as she does to her own raggedy son… The magic of this story is too beautiful and, yes, equally too hard to bear. And I am in denial about what really eventually happened. As with Deborah’s pool…. And with whatever else was acceptable to write about in 1959. Far worse than now. While our now is somehow still far worse than their then. Null Immortalis. *** “How beautiful they are,
The lordly ones
Who dwell in the hills,
In the hollow hills.” — William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) (Used in Rutland Boughton’s 1914 opera, ‘The Immortal Hour’) For those interested, my detailed review of all the stories in Daphne’s BREAKING POINT collection HERE |
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