Don't Look Now, Daphne DuMaurier

This is a set of stories so compelling that I hunted this copy down over years so I could read them again. I love Daphne DuMaurier and her misty worlds redolent of purity and insidious danger, and these stories have the same tang, but... twisted, somehow. Just for example, the title story is about someone who has a vivid dream, and in the process of trying to understand the meaning of the dream, inserts herself in a crime so convoluted that nothing else could possibly cause her to be involved. Curiosity killed the cat, in other words. That story just stuck with me, and the same is true of her other short story book, The Blue Lenses, in the titular story of which the lenses make the post-operative eyes of the protagonist see only the animal within his visitors, not the human faces they once seemed to wear. The short story form seems to have forced DuMaurier to condense her already dense prose, so that these stories have all the fraughtness, plot and conflict of her spacious period dramas, but distilled, like bog-whiskey.
I hope to meet this book a third time some day, but I'm going to let this one go again now I've re-read it. And once more, thank you, old friend.
Score = +2 (6 saved, 4 released)