Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier
Published 1971 · 86,979 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Horror, Thriller, Gothic Fiction
How hard is Don't Look Now to read?
Don't Look Now scores 53 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: 42 out of 100
- Du Maurier employs cultured, period-precise vocabulary — 'sotto voce,' 'saturnine,' 'impervious,' 'importunate,' 'naïve' — drawn from British middle-class professional registers (classics teacher, electronics engineer, clergyman). Specialist terms surface where stories demand them: archaeological Greek pottery in 'Not After Midnight,' electronics and radar in 'The Breakthrough.' Readers encounter unfamiliar words occasionally, but context always supplies meaning, placing the collection closer to The Great Gatsby than to Gravity's Rainbow.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Sentences run longer than contemporary fiction, with subordinate clauses chained into interior-monologue rhythms: John's rationalizing thoughts in 'Don't Look Now' spiral through three or four dependent clauses before landing on a verb. The narrators' self-justifying syntax mirrors their unreliability. Still, the prose never approaches Jamesian hypotaxis or Faulknerian suspension — each sentence eventually resolves, and paragraphs breathe. The register is confident literary fiction, demanding but not taxing.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Du Maurier keeps her philosophical weight in the concrete: a small figure in a red mackintosh glimpsed through a Venice canal, a Greek pottery jar warm to the touch, a dead child's presence pressing against grieving parents. The supernatural, psychological, and moral questions the stories raise are grounded in specific objects, bodies, and places. There are no authorial digressions into metaphysics; meaning surfaces through scene and image rather than argument.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Five complete story-worlds are packed into a single volume, each with its own cast, setting, and atmospheric logic — Venice, Crete, Jerusalem, the English east coast marshes. Within stories the density is measured: du Maurier layers atmosphere carefully, withholding key information rather than overwhelming the reader with it. The pace is more Austerlitz than Ulysses — slow paragraphs, careful observation, one revelation per beat.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Du Maurier's narrators are systematically self-deceived, and readers must read against their testimony. John in 'Don't Look Now' dismisses every supernatural warning — the twin sisters' psychic vision, Laura's instincts — and his rational certainty drives him to his death. Tim Grey in 'Not After Midnight' confesses his 'bug' in euphemism, and readers must decode what the affliction actually is. Du Maurier never states what the text means; the gap between narrator's confidence and authorial irony is the story.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Water recurs as a death-medium across the collection: Venice's canals swallow John, Crete's sea claims the previous occupant of chalet 62, the east coast marshes frame 'The Breakthrough.' Archaeological artifacts carry corrupting weight in 'Not After Midnight' — the Silenus jar as a vessel of ancient transgression. The red mackintosh worn by the figure John pursues to his death inverts the red coat his dead daughter Christine wore. These motifs are present and purposeful without reaching the density of Moby-Dick's whale or Woolf's lighthouse.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- All five narrators speak from positions that du Maurier's plotting systematically undermines. John's sceptical rationalism is revealed as the blindness that kills him. Tim Grey's self-presentation as a respectable bachelor schoolmaster conceals a condition the reader is left to name. The Rev. Babcock in 'The Way of the Cross' performs Christian humility while seething with class resentment. Du Maurier maintains a steady gap between what narrators claim and what the stories demonstrate — not the full Nabokovian hall of mirrors, but consistent and demanding.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- 'Don't Look Now' ends in sudden violent death with no redemptive frame — John's psychic vision arrives at the moment of his murder, answering nothing. 'Not After Midnight' ends with the narrator sealing himself in alcoholic solitude, his fate unresolved. 'The Breakthrough' closes on an opened channel between the living and the dead that no one knows how to close. Du Maurier withholds comfort and explanation across the collection — plots close but meaning stays open, placing the stories well above The Great Gatsby and close to Lolita in ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Each story uses first-person or close-third narration with a retrospective frame, creating modest dramatic irony but no radical formal experiments. 'Not After Midnight' opens as a recovered document, gesturing toward frame-narrative complexity without fully exploiting it. 'Don't Look Now' uses tight third-person limited to control information. The collection's five-story architecture itself creates no overarching structural interplay — the stories stand independently. Linear, controlled, accessible.
How Don't Look Now is regarded
Don't Look Now holds a literary regard score of 60 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.