Almost a novella, this is quite different from the Hitchcock movie. The story concerns the reaction of a young family to the attack from the birds. The father immediately senses danger and begins boarding up windows. They hear reports on the radio that this is a country-wide phenomena. The birds seem to come and go with the tides so there is time between attacks although they are just as savage as in the movie. There is no romance in this version. It is about the father trying to save his family. It ends ambiguously. I don't remember if the movie did too.
George Kelley
Jerry House
FOR SOME REASON, I CANNOT PICK UP LINKS.
7 comments:
I read some where that du Maurier didn't much like the film adaptation of her story - not 100% sure if that's true. She was really good at ratcheting up the suspense,
A great story which gave me the creeps when I first read it in junior high school.
The film, scripted by Evan Hunter, had a strange ending that I'm still unsure of. Hunter wrote of his experience in his book ME AND HITCH.
For a different take on the theme, try Philip MacDonald's oft-reprinted "Our Feathered Friends."
Yes, the movie had an open ending. I read the story many years ago.
I finished Robert Boswell's LIVING TO BE 100 and Ruth Ozeki's THE TYPING LADY.
I have a couple of anthologies on hand.
I read the story a few years ago, but I still haven't read all the stories in the collection, Don't Look Now. I should get back to them.
I'm pretty sure I first read this one in one of Robert Arthur's Random House Hitchcock-branded young-readers' anthologies, AH'S SPELLBINDERS IN SUSPENSE, about the same time as I saw the film adaptation on tv ("Evan Hunter" was easily the worst of the relevant trio of writers, if we think of Du Maurier, Robert Arthur and "Hunter" as a set). Considerably better than the film. I'm most amused at the moment that the story first appeared in a 1962 issue of GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, which even a decade-slightly-plus later was a much duller magazine, about the time I read the Arthur antho.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?512071
Publication: _Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense_ (1967)
(Other Hitchcock anthologies by Random House in a similar format are attributed to Robert Arthur as ghost editor. Online sources attribute this title to Arthur as well.) (TM: Henry Veit ghost-edited the last two RH kids' "AH" anthos after Arthur died in 1969)
Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense • interior artwork by Harold Isen
11 • The Most Dangerous Game • (1924) • novelette by Richard Edward Connell [as by Richard Connell]
32 • The Birds • (1952) • novelette by Daphne du Maurier
79 • Eyewitness • (1939) • novelette by Robert Arthur
94 • Man from the South • (1948) • short story by Roald Dahl
105 • Black Magic • (1938) • short story by Sax Rohmer
119 • Treasure Trove • (1959) • short story by F. Tennyson Jesse (variant of Thirty Pieces of Silver 1924)
126 • Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper • (1943) • short story by Robert Bloch
146 • The Treasure Hunt • [J. G. Reeder] • (1924) • short story by Edgar Wallace
TM
Blogspot has been acting up with me for some time of late.
I also enjoyed when Hunter's McBain novels referenced BIRDS and other film and TV properties like BLACKBOARD JUNGLE that Hunter was involved in. One novel had the characters discussing how HILL STREET BLUES was so oddly similar to those characters lives and the city of Isola.
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