In my handbag for a re-read.

Better than the film

Into the short fiction box

Taken from the Short Fiction Bookbox

I saw "The Birds" must be about 50 years ago when I used to be allowed up late on a Friday night to watch whichever film was featuring on "Appointment With Fear". The details of the storyline escape me but I remember Tippi Hedren being pecked at though I seem to have a vague recollection of the setting being in a town/city whereas the book focuses on the family of a farm labourer.

The whole scenario is bought scarily to life & as Nat & his family barricade themselves in their home the tension builds beautifully.

Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines"

I particularly liked this passage which simply, yet scarily, conveyed the menacing sight of so many birds gathered together...just waiting...:

"Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas.
What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands... They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide."

A classic tale indeed & although a quick read, manages to create a very unsettling feeling within its few pages.

Put in a leaflet dispender by the entrance

Released as part of the 2023 SEPTEMBER SAPPHIRE CHALLENGE (#112)(actual cover looks bluer than this pic!) the 2023 YOU'RE SUCH AN ANIMAL CHALLENGE (#55)
& the 2023 MOVIE BOOKS RELEASE CHALLENGE (#45)




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