DON'T LOOK NOW

With Daphne du Maurier you always know where you're at, or do you, since all of these five, long stories deal with supernal manifestations of one kind or another. Whether in the title story (the best?) about a young couple's experience of death and the afterlife in Venice when under the influence of two elderly psychics who appear and disappear. Or the last "The Way of the Cross" (the best?) when an English tour group in the Holy Land experience various chastening experiences — an elderly Colonel is forced to remember his flogging of a Jewish boy; a pious spinster falls in the "drain they call the Pool of Bethesda"; and an uncontained youngster is the only one to relate then and now. In between there are other experiences of recognition (a father, dying, the daughter who is not his) and precognition so that the evening's entertainment is assured. Without a doubt all within its shadow.