Art by M. D. Jackson
This post begins: What Daphne du Maurier does in “The Birds” was not new. H. G. Wells was her mentor, I believe, for he wrote several stories about animals that are monsters, from the killer squids in “The Sea Raiders”, to bats in “In the Avu Observatory” to ants in “Empire of the Ants”. He even managed it with humans in “The Country of the Blind”. The lesson that Du Maurier learned from Wells was ordinary creatures, usually loveable and agreeable, can become monstrous once they deviate from their expected behaviors. These deviations are logical in that the birds are still flying animals in most respects. (They do team-up with other birds that are usually predators they avoid.) They do not talk or other impossible actions that would drive the story into pure fantasy. They just wake up one day and want to kill us. Bad.
