Scan barcode
A review by chloekg
The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith by Patricia Highsmith
5.0
The first four sets of stories had me raving to friends. "She's a cruel b****! She stabs the knife from a different angle every time. It's like she has no milk of human kindness except to make me love the person she's about to eviscerate. What a spectrum of rottenness." The breadth is breathtaking, and the writing is clean and sharp.
Reading the last collection, Mermaids on the Golf Course, my impression was less enthusiastic. I rated the collection four stars at finish because the last of her theoretical psyches were subtler, not so knife-edged, and I had trouble naming what had me feeling off about them. Where Little Tales of Misogyny are extremist fantasies, character flaws hyper-magnified in deliciously sinister vignettes, Mermaids is like a clinical sci-fi genre. Instead of building worlds or robots, Highsmith creates psychological profiles of people who are "realistic" but just wrong enough to be "not quite right." Their mundane "realness" was boring compared to the absolutely brutal crush of earlier stories.
When I woke up after rating it four stars, I realized my unsettled feeling was a slow internal bleed where I'd been looking for the gush of a knife. Yes, they were last collection and freshest in my memory, but they landed deepest. It has its share of tropes and razors, a love letter to God and the pure of heart, but there's an innocence and inevitability and normalcy to these characters that feel like fiction's response to the banality of evil. The depravity is somehow heightened because "that's just the way people are." These are not exaggerations, but tragedies walking around and feeling pretty fine most of the time. I might feel a fair mental distance away from Tom Ripley or a ravenous truffle pig, but the psychic rot of these last unlucky characters could come for me or for anyone. Five stars for a new genre of horror.
Reading the last collection, Mermaids on the Golf Course, my impression was less enthusiastic. I rated the collection four stars at finish because the last of her theoretical psyches were subtler, not so knife-edged, and I had trouble naming what had me feeling off about them. Where Little Tales of Misogyny are extremist fantasies, character flaws hyper-magnified in deliciously sinister vignettes, Mermaids is like a clinical sci-fi genre. Instead of building worlds or robots, Highsmith creates psychological profiles of people who are "realistic" but just wrong enough to be "not quite right." Their mundane "realness" was boring compared to the absolutely brutal crush of earlier stories.
When I woke up after rating it four stars, I realized my unsettled feeling was a slow internal bleed where I'd been looking for the gush of a knife. Yes, they were last collection and freshest in my memory, but they landed deepest. It has its share of tropes and razors, a love letter to God and the pure of heart, but there's an innocence and inevitability and normalcy to these characters that feel like fiction's response to the banality of evil. The depravity is somehow heightened because "that's just the way people are." These are not exaggerations, but tragedies walking around and feeling pretty fine most of the time. I might feel a fair mental distance away from Tom Ripley or a ravenous truffle pig, but the psychic rot of these last unlucky characters could come for me or for anyone. Five stars for a new genre of horror.