I am homes

Quotational endorsements on book covers don't always give you a lot of insight into the real impact of a piece of potential literature. A quick browse of my roommate's bookshelf tells me "The Time Traveler's Wife" is -- and I nearly quote -- enchantingly beautiful and dazzlingly romantic. But that doesn't make me want to read it. At all. Luckily, works that are both amazing and aged penetrate enough intellectual minds to accumulate more thoughtful words. In those cases, pull quotes are classy and beautifully free of exclamation points. Such an inspired word byte appears on the backside of "Don't Look Now," a collection of Daphne du Maurier short stories. The little nugget of wisdom caught my attention because its author was able to say exactly what I had been thinking the whole time: "Daphne du Maurier's genius lay in her plots, which she spun with astounding originality and ease ... (they) have an effectiveness that makes them seem almost traditional, belonging not to any one author but to the imagination of the world." -- Alberto Manguel. When you read Daphne's stories, you feel as if you're reading fables of the ages -- tales that have been embedded in the collective subconscious since tales were things to tell. The kicker is that you simultaneously feel like du Maurier's singular imagination is a bottomless pit of newness. What this adds up to is that these are stories that simply need to be written, told, heard.

Du Maurier writes little mysteries -- riddles almost -- that tangle like hair and resolve like the release of a long-held breath. For me, each story was a tiny masterpiece, from "The Birds" to the lengthy "Monte Verita." I can honestly say there wasn't a story there I didn't finish without a satisfied smile slowly creeping up my cheeks. But so out of reverence for my obsession, I don't intend to expound upon my individual infatuations with du Maurier bits until my second readings of them. I'll obsess, but I won't over-permeate. Which leads me to post-part 2.

On my way to Short Story Town, I most recently finished the A.M. Homes collection "The Safety of Objects." I sped through this large-fonted paperback, relishing the stories in a similarly rewarding way. Du Maurier tells stories you can feel in the world's imagination; Homes tells stories you knew existed, but until now, no one would admit to it. You want to point your finger at the characters and yell in italics: "I knew it!" These aren't fairy tales, they're tattle-tales. They're windows into our neighbors' homes. You might see into their hearts, more likely you will see into their pants -- and it's not pretty. Homes knows how to convey familiar (if ugly) sensations, like the sweaty thigh sticking to the vinyl lawn chair or the chewiness of a Barbie doll foot in a child's mouth -- as well as unfamiliar urges like the near-heartbreaking quest of a kidnapper to replace his (dead?) son, or the desperation of a mother who goes to extremes to end her family's suffering. On top of this, she outs the secret sexual curiosities of ages 1 to 100, with a precision that keeps the reader one step short of uncomfortable. We ogle, but we know these are the exploits of others. It's the type of "fiction" we see sometimes exposed in the news, but more often we picture it the ignorance of trailer trash or the stuff of Lifetime movies. "Stiletto sharp," says the front cover quote.

Speaking of movies, I'm planning to watch "The Safety of Objects" in film form asap ... and I'm hoping "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" aren't far off the horizon. Apparently D du M wasn't much of a fan of Hitchcock's version of the latter, but that only makes me want to see it all the more. I've got another short-story master on deck, this time it's inspired by what inspired Daphne. "Stories" by Katherine Mansfield ... I figure if Daphne loved "Jane Eyre," we might have more tastes in common. But not before I finish my detour in man-town with "On the Road." Then maybe I'll pull A.M. Homes's "Music for Torching" out of the dugout. It's the continued story of a set of surburbanites who spend their staycation experimenting with crack. Yes, crack.