Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier
Published 1971 · 346 pages · 98,684 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Horror, Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is Don't Look Now to read?
Don't Look Now scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Du Maurier writes in clear, polished mid-century prose with no specialized jargon or archaic terms. The vocabulary is precise and occasionally elevated but never obscure, sitting comfortably between Fitzgerald's elegant accessibility and Ishiguro's formal clarity.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Sentences are well-constructed and occasionally complex, with embedded clauses tracking characters' interior states, but Du Maurier never approaches Jamesian hypotaxis or Faulknerian extremes. The syntax is controlled and readable, prioritizing psychological suspense over formal difficulty.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The stories operate concretely through plot and setting — Venice canals, Cornwall cliffs, specific social situations — but grief, guilt, and the uncanny accumulate beneath the surface. Du Maurier grounds metaphysical unease in physical reality rather than pursuing philosophical abstraction directly.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- These are short stories and novellas of moderate density: richly atmospheric but paced for sustained narrative tension rather than encyclopedic layering. Readers absorb character psychology and setting details steadily without being overwhelmed.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Du Maurier withholds crucial information and frames events through characters whose perceptions are compromised by grief, desire, or paranoia. Meaning accumulates laterally; the reader senses wrongness before the characters do, and the gap between what protagonists believe and what is actually happening requires active inference.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Water, blindness, twins, and the uncanny double function as persistent motifs across the collection. The symbolic register is controlled rather than baroque — the red-coated figure in the title story condenses grief, delusion, and fate into a single image — but Du Maurier never allows symbolism to overwhelm narrative momentum.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Du Maurier maintains a measured distance from her protagonists, allowing readers to perceive their self-deception and rationalizations while the characters remain largely blind to them. This irony is structural rather than satirical — closer to Henry James than Paul Beatty — and sharpens the horror of each story's resolution.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Individual stories resolve in devastating or shocking ways, but Du Maurier resists moral explanation and leaves the deeper questions — about perception, fate, and the nature of premonition — genuinely open. The endings close plots while opening interpretive abysses.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- As a short story collection, the book is structurally conventional: discrete, self-contained narratives each with their own arc. Within individual stories, Du Maurier uses close third-person perspective and some temporal layering, but there are no radical formal experiments or nested structures.
How Don't Look Now is regarded
Don't Look Now holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.