In a cruel twist of irony, Texas-born Patricia Highsmith
(1921-1995) is being recognized only after her death for her
inestimable genius in her native land. With the savage humor of
Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Poe, she brought a distinctly
contemporary acuteness to her prolific body of noir fiction.
Including over 60 short stories written throughout her career,
collected together for the first time, The Selected Stories reveals
the stunning versatility and terrifying power of Highsmith's work.
These stories highlight the remarkable range of Highsmith's powers
her unique ability to quickly, almost imperceptibly, draw out the
mystery and strangeness of her subject, which appears achingly
ordinary to our naked eye. Whether writing about jaded wives or
household pets, Highsmith continually upsets our expectations and
presents a world frighteningly familiar to our own, where danger
lurks around every turn. Stories from The Animal-Lovers Book of
Beastly Murders portray, with incisive humor, the murderously
competitive desires of our most trusted companions. In this
viciously satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and cockroaches
are no longer necessary aspects of a happy home but actually have
the power to destroy it. In the short sketches that make up the
Little Tales of Misogyny, Highsmith rediscovers predictable female
characters "The Dancer," "The Female Novelist," "The Prude" and,
through scathing humor, invests them with uniquely destructive
powers. As a writer, Highsmith was all too well aware of the stolid
patriarchal conventions that ruled her day her publisher rejected
her second book out of hand because of its homosexual content. She
is not a polemicist, but, as stories like "Oona the Jolly Cave
Woman" and "The Mobile Bed-Object" reveal, her bizarre, haunting
fiction continually betrays the inadequacy of our conventional
understanding of female character. Highsmith eventually moved away
from these coolly satiric, darkly comic exercises, and in her later
collections, The Black House, Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, and
Mermaids on the Golf Course, she uses the warm familiarities of
middle-class life the manicured lawns, the cozy uptown apartments,
the local pubs as the backbone for her chilling portrayals. "The
Black House," for instance, explores the small-town male
camaraderie and the destructive secret it masks: in this world, the
fact that everyone knows your name is more likely a curse than a
blessing. In the title story of the final collection presented
here, "Mermaids on a Golf-Course," a man's extraordinary brush with
death endows his everyday desires with fantastically devastating
consequences. In her later work, Highsmith adds a dimension of
penetrating psychological insight, evoked most vividly in stories
like "A Curious Suicide" and "The Stuff of Madness," where the
precarious line between fantasy and reality is blurred and we
experience the terrifying possibility of slipping between them.
Great writers view the world askew, and in their art they reflect
our world back to us, slightly distorted. The Selected Stories
reveals Highsmith's deft and exacting style, her incisive satirical
intelligence, and her faultless eye for depicting the inner
tremblings of human character. Her world remains all the more
frightening because we recognize it as our own.
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