THE DEEP ONES: "Don’t Look Now" by Daphne du Maurier

"Don’t Look Now" by Daphne du Maurier

Discussion begins on June 12th.

First published in Don't Look Now (1971).



ONLINE VERSIONS

No complete online versions found to date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?85189

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Classics of the Macabre
Foundations of Fear
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
Don't Look Now

MISCELLANY

http://www.dumaurier.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_du_Maurier
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=711&fulltext=1
http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/blog/?p=20770
http://tinyurl.com/mz7r8vf

I'll be reading the Folio Society collection Don't Look Now and Other Stories. (Touchstones aren't working because the book's been combined with other collections of the same title and the screenplay for Nic Roeg's film).

I'll be reading this one in the 2008 edition of Don't look now (New York Review of Books Classics).

Reading it out of the '71 hardcover pictured in #1, which I was lucky enough to pick up for a song earlier this year.

The Weird for me.

Don't Look Now for me - New York Review of Books Classics edition.

>4 artturnerjr:

Art, just out of curiosity - that's a Book Club edition, right?

Echoes from the Macabre for me.

>7 semdetenebre:

Yeah, unfortunately, as they are generally not as valuable. :(

Are we gonna be discussing the Creedence Clearwater Revival song of the same name as well? :D

***

Fun fact: Noc Roeg's film adaptation of this story is currently ranked 129th on They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1,000 Greatest Films:

http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films_table.php

> 4, 7, 9

I just read it out of an edition that looks the same, with the 1971 date, but no Book Club imprimatur. (I don't own it; I checked it out of the public library.)

>4 artturnerjr:,7,9,11

Reason I asked was that I could swear the other day the ISFDB entry for the 1971 edition said it was released as "book club only", which seemed strange. I can't find that now. If you look up the title on ABE books, there are plenty of 1971 first editions to be had cheaply, so I'm still not sure what I saw. The Folio Society edition mentioned by housefulofpaper looks nice. Maybe I'll add both to my collection!

ETA

The ISFDB entry now has a note which states "A Book Club Edition according to dust jacket". Maybe it was adjusted since I read it the first time?

>10 artturnerjr:

Roeg's film version of Don't Look Now certainly deserves a sweet spot on any decent "greatest horror films of all time" list.

>13 semdetenebre:

I've actually never seen it. I really want to now that I've read the story, though. 8)

It's after midnight here and I'm still up, so I'll go ahead and start.

This is a good one. Once I was about 10 pages into it, it had its hooks in me and I didn't want to put it down until I was finished. On the negative side, I correctly guessed how it would turn (generally speaking) several pages before the end. Still, a well-thought-out and compelling blend of psychic phenomena, grotesquerie, and nightmarish thrills 'n' chills, wrapped up like a Christmas present, pretty as you please.

Something the story got me thinking about: what, precisely, is the nature of John's precognitive vision? Is he perceiving tachyons from the future? Are the eternalists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)) correct in saying that time is merely another dimension and that our sequential perception of time is illusory, and is John, in a moment of clarity, able to see the "future"? Discuss.

>15 artturnerjr:

C'mon Art - you may have been able to tell that John was doomed - but by a demented, homicidal female dwarf dressed like a little girl?! ;-)

The ending is pure du Maurier. The most amazing thing to me is that she is able to pull it off. In any other hands it would surely be silly and trite. Here, it is simply horrifying (I think the scene is even more powerful in the film, believe it or not). Also, John doesn't seem to be quite as overwhelmed by Christine's death as Laura is. Maybe the dwarf represents his unconscious, conflicted shame over this fact? Could the dwarf be a manifestation of John's inner rage (rather like in Cronenberg's The Brood), or are such things par for the course in mysterious Venice?

Yes, I must admit, I was surprised. I knew that John must suffer some terrible fate, but I was totally deceived into thinking that the "little girl" was a non-consensual hallucination until it killed him.

All of the back-and-forth with the sisters and the police was very effective at creating tension, ambiguity and confusion.

Funny, but there's a Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game expansion announced for later this year called "Terror in Venice." I've been wondering about the literary precedents for the expansion's theme, since there are no stories by HPL or other vertebral "mythos" authors set in Venice to my knowledge.

I wonder if there will be a card for Crazed Killer showing a demented female dwarf dressed like a little girl?

>17 paradoxosalpha:

The dialog in general - both inner and spoken - is purely believable. I had the impression that I was eavesdropping rather than reading at several points.

>15 artturnerjr:, 18

I have another weird tale set in Venice on the tip of my tongue - was it by Robert Aickman? I'll work on it. While not specifically Lovecraftian, I found the following passage, which really comes resoundingly out of the blue, to be quite effective. It even has echoes of recent WT discussions of weird time:

The experts are right, he thought, Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.

ETA

Aickman did write a story called "Never Visit Venice", but that's not what I'm thinking of, since I've never read it! http://tinyurl.com/od2w8sl

>16 semdetenebre:

C'mon Art - you may have been able to tell that John was doomed - but by a demented, homicidal female dwarf dressed like a little girl?! ;-)

Lol - ok, I'll be more precise. About 10 pages from the end, I said to myself, "John's gonna get killed by this murderer guy" (which, right there, shows I was off-base, assuming the murderer was a guy) "at the end." I did not know the murderer was gonna be some dwarf chick dressed like a little girl. :D

Maybe the dwarf represents his unconscious, conflicted shame over this fact?

Ooo, good one! I think he clearly does attempt to come to what he perceives to be her rescue because of feelings of guilt about his dead daughter (actually, he's feeling guilty about just everything at that point, isn't he?).

>19 semdetenebre:

The experts are right, he thought, Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone.

That has a nice Shadow Over Innsmouth vibe to it, doesn't it? 8)

Almost completely OT, but for Venetian Weird, I couldn't help understanding The Vampires of Venice as Deep Ones, even if they were supposed to be recent extraterrestrial immigrants.

I had actually seen the movie before I read the story, but it was years ago, and I didn't remember the story until the very end and then the movie's image of the dwarf came to my mind.

I'm afraid the ending didn't do all that much for -- dwarfwise or the concept behind it. And I do think the movie's visual is better at evoking some weird grotesqueness than Du Maurier's words. But I do like the last line. It strikes me as very realistic because that was pretty much exactly my reaction when I honestly thought I was dying (not even close in actuality) once.

But the story did pull me along. I liked the minutely described emotional turmoil John experiences: guilt, annoyance, joy, paranoia, embarrassment, regret. And the dialogue was very nice as well as the bit with the nocturnal Venice being such a different world than sunny Venice. And I like the sudden escalations in tension: the vision of the dead Christine revealed, Laura seemingly wandering Venice instead of in England, her actual presence in England being confirmed, and, of course John's ultimate fate.

As for Lovecraftian Venices, there's A. C. Wise's "Venice Burning" in Future Lovecraft.

My reading of this story couldn't help but be coloured by previously having watched the film version. Certainly, I knew what the ending would be (As a matter of fact, I knew that before I watched the film. Somewhere, a book or magazine had casually given away it away years before I saw it).

I noticed that du Maurier's writing sounds like a lot of the British writers of the mid-20th century that, for example, have been republished by the Tartarus Press - Hugh Walpole, Oliver Onions, L. P. Hartley, for example - but the pace is much snappier and "American" (as I suspect those writers would have characterised it).

John and Laura certainly epitomise the British stiff upper lip. This rings true for me, given their class and the time when this story was written. This John seems more like the sort of character that (say) Kenneth More would have played (it's Donald Sutherland in the film).

I thought I detected a strain of pitch black humour in the way John's particular type of, as I said, stiff upper lip masculinity, is undercut through the story right up to the ending. Nothing he does comes right and, at the end, it is indeed a bloody silly way to die.

Classics of the Macabre finally deigned to turn up via interlibrary today, causing me to dash madly for the library before closing time; which impetuosity was duly punished by a shower on the way home (no points for guessing whether I'd bothered to bring along a rain jacket).

Never having read du Maurier before, I don't know what I was expecting, but certainly not this, neither the portrait of John and Laura's relationship nor the homicidal dwarf.

One nice detail that struck me was the guy at the hotel reporting that Laura's flight had left with a full complement of passengers - he, if not John, ought briefly have reflected on the unlikelihood of a replacement replacement passenger being found on that short notice, and asked if just possibly the signora might have gone with it after all. But of course it's only too believable that they failed to connect the dots.

Another nice one is Laura's deciding that it was Johnnie the twins warned her about. If she'd had complete faith in their powers, she'd stuck to the warning being about John (sr), and leapt at his suggestion of them both going by aeroplane to get him away ASAP.