Not After Midnight and Other Stories

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I would like to thank my wonderful guest, Sally Gimon & Cletus R Bulach, for putting up with my shenanigans and being on the show. We had a conversation that was both entertaining and meaningful.

An engineer is sent to join a team of scientific researchers at a base in the middle of the Norfolk marshes. When he arrives, he finds that the place is almost deserted and what remains of the team have become obsessed with a device called Charon, which already has strange uses ('calling' animals and children from miles away, for example) and is intended for an even more sinister purpose. Vices, up to the present, literally none. Which is not being self-complacent, but the truth is that my life has been uneventful by any standard. Nor has this bothered me. I am probably a dull man. Emotionally I have had no complications.” El estanque (**). Unos niños, de vacaciones junto a su familia, se divierten jugando en el bosque, cerca de un estanque que obsesiona a Deborah. Narrado a modo de falso cuento infantil, no ha acabado de gustarme. Stephen Saunders is sent to an isolated laboratory on the salt marshes of the East Coast to help out with a secret project. He is told that the laboratory is in need of an electrical engineer, but is given no other details. On arrival, Stephen discovers that he is expected to help operate the computer for an experiment to trap a human's vital spark, or psychic energy, at the point of death and prevent it from going to waste. The test subject is Ken, an affable young assistant who is dying of leukaemia.When she was gone, he was haunted by the things he had done wrong. He couldn’t cope and was turning to alcohol to drown the pain. The memories of happier times tormented him at night when he was alone. Hank couldn’t kill the monster just like he couldn’t fix the things he had done wrong. He couldn’t repair his relationship until Abby returned. He realised that Abby was the only thing he wanted. She kept his demons away and made him the person he was. Without her, he would be haunted every night and unable to cope with normal life.

A married couple, John and Laura, are on holiday in Venice following the death of their young daughter. The story opens as they fear they are being followed by a pair of elderly twins: their joking about the sisters takes a more sinister turn when one approaches Laura and claims she can see the ghost of their daughter alongside them. I would like to thank my wonderful guests, Randi-Lee Bowslaugh and Uma Ojeda, for putting up with my shenanigans and being on the show. We had a conversation that was both entertaining and meaningful. He has either caught the 'disease' of an unhappy strain of alcoholism, or feels guilty because he has witnessed a murder and has not acted upon it in a way that the upright and uptight citizen he was would not be able to bear. (But in that case, why doesn't he just act on it and just go to the authorities about Mrs Stoll and her companion?) Or he may have caught the mania to search for and collect stuff from the past, which will distract him from his general life.Following them into the nearby town one night, Grey is confronted by the Stoll, who is keen to extol the virtues of his home-made supply:

The next day they are gone. Grey is about to depart himself, but the Stolls have left him one last present in the care of the bar-keep: The Breakthrough" is the earliest story in the collection, written in 1964 in response to a request from Kingsley Amis who was hoping to edit a collection of science-fiction stories, a collection which never ultimately appeared. It was written before The House on the Strand, for which it was in some ways a rehearsal. [6] Don't Look Now" (5 stars)-John and Laura are a married couple trying to rediscover each other after the lost of a child. However, something or someone still seems to be with them. I loved the Gothic elements in this story and the ending.

Other stuff worth a look...

He bent down and brought out a small screw-topped bottle filled with what appeared to be bitter lemon. “Left here last evening with Mr Stoll’s compliments,” he said. “He waited for you in the bar until nearly midnight, but you never came. So I promised to hand it over when you did.” I looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?” I asked. The bar-tender smiled. “Some of his chalet home-brew,” he said. “It’s quite harmless, he gave me a bottle for myself and my wife. She says it’s nothing but lemonade. The real smelling stuff must have been thrown away. Try it.” He had poured some into my mineral water before I could stop him. Hesitant, wary, I dipped my finger into the glass and tasted it. It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with ears of ripening corn.

The collection concludes with The Breakthrough, a story in which a scientist is given the assignment to work with a colleague whose reputation is somewhat tainted by rumours of strange or useless experiments he makes. This latter man, by the name of MacLean, lost his wife years ago, and as our narrator finds out he is now working on a way of preserving the basic vital energy – he is careful to make it clear that he does not think of it in terms of a soul – that exudes the body in the moment of death and usually gets lost in the air. What a waste of energy! Just imagine how the energy stored in this spark of life could be used more productively – probably even carbon neutrally! While this rather freakish pipe-dream may be the result of MacLean’s failure to come to terms with the loss of his wife in a way, in yet another way it shows capitalism and utilitarianism at their worst: Not content to exploit human energy and creativity while humans are alive, or to regard the dead body as a depot for human spare parts, the idea now lies in turning the divine spark itself into disposable energy. This is the most frightening thought I came across in the whole book, and du Maurier has a deft hand at developing the moral implications. (****) The Breakthrough is a weird little story, and the author doesn’t seem to feel entirely comfortable with it. It doesn’t really go anywhere, is more eerie than tense, and it suffers particularly from the necessity of a massive info-dump. Far too much of it feels like set-up – and set-up of the kind particular to supernatural and near-supernatural stories, where an excessive degree of simultaneously credulity and calmness is required on the part of the characters. On the other hand, it IS eerie – and the characterisation of the narrator is particularly impressive. His character is never complex or original, but the vividness of it, and the ease and brevity with which that vividness is created, is something to be admired. The plot doesn’t particularly make much sense. Overall, it’s not a very satisfying story to rest a collection on, but as an interesting little morsel (and it is the shortest of the five, I think) thrown in among the rest it’s not a bad space-filler. A vacationing teacher has a gut feeling about another couple's invitation to spend more time together. Not after Midnight" (5 stars)-This story was a bit long, but I liked how it played out. A school teacher who is away on vacation to Crete starts to realize there is something sinister with a married couple that is located nearby where he is staying. He finds out the person who stayed in his chalet came to a bad end and now he's wondering if the couple could have had something to do with it. There are some horror/supernatural elements afoot here. I still wonder about the married man. But once again, solid ending.

Du Maurier’s work is… peculiar, to say the least. The stories defy easy genre classifications, and indeed that seems to be a large part of their design: placing her plots on the fine edge between supernatural and mundane, romantic and prosaic, tragic and hopeful (though mostly tragic), she gives the reader no warnings, no time to get comfortable. Some stories will seem realistic, only to veer into fantasy; others will appear to aim for the supernatural, only to slide into the perfectly ordinary. These are stories of suspense – but to a large degree, what we are suspended by is not concern for the characters, but concern for the story itself: the reader is in the position of watching a literary game of three card monte, sometimes not knowing what sort of story they have been reading until the concluding paragraphs. How will these two mesh during the show? What will they find out they have in common? What about their differences? Find out on Here.