Du Maurier

He also revealed that he is in a book club with other dads from his daughter's former school and that they have read 40-50 works of classic fiction, including JD Salinger's The Catcher in The Rye, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach.

Like the protagonist in Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," Captain tells his story in first person, but never names himself.

Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperiled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip.

Among them: “Little Women,” on the occasion of its 150th anniversary; “Anne of Green Gables”; Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”; and Daphne du Maurier’s forever-young “Rebecca.”

You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”