A review by jwsg
The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories by Patricia Highsmith

3.0

Patricia Highsmith's Eleven is a collection of, well, 11 dark tales featuring a cast of bizarre characters, some twisted, some troubled and yet others just tragic. I picked up the collection after reading The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which mentioned one of the short stories in Eleven - The Quest for Blank Claveringi. This particular short story is about a professor of zoology's deadly quest to find the mythical giant man-eating snails of Kuwa. Reading the first story, The Snail Watcher, I was a little concerned that this might turn out to be a collection of tales about snails and other assorted molluscs but thankfully, this was not the case (although there was a story called The Terrapin and the final story in the collection featured an unidentifiable creature plaguing a young couple). Not quite my kind of fiction but the tales were well written and suitably engrossing.