Eleven Book

This was Patricia Highsmith's first collection of short stories, and each tale seems to focus on her specialty, which was that of obsession and compulsion. Much like her second collection, Little Tales of Misogyny , in which every story in some way focuses on attributes or archetypes of femininity that society teaches us to disdain, each of the eleven stories in Eleven explores bizarre urges and dark corners of the human mind you'd much rather look away from. While nowhere near as memorable as her novels, these still provide small glimpses of the strangeness this brilliant but unlikable woman was fascinated by, and some will certainly unsettle. Graham Greene describes Highsmith's forte better than I ever could in his excellent introduction:

"Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time, as we all learned in the blitz, is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably. We have to learn to live with it."

What struck me most about this collection is that despite her usually trading in psychological crime, and these stories being miniature psychological thrillers in their own right, quite a few of them were firmly rooted somewhere in a hard to define horror genre'her prose is carefully planned, no word is wasted or misplaced, and the result are stories of such a disturbing intensity that they engulf the reader to the point that they feel claustrophobic, despite the often very mundane subject matter.

The Snail-Watcher · ★★★½
Highsmith kept something like 300 snails as pets, and this autobiographical element might in part be responsible for making this one, while perhaps not the best, certainly the most memorable of all the stories included. A broker watches the increasing number of snails he keeps at home with a curiosity that comes to border on voyeurism and turns into a fixation. I read it with mounting horror while feeling the deepest levels of physical revulsion; I can't recall any other short story that managed to disgust me to such an extent with so little, and I'm not at all surprised that it took her over a decade to find someone willing to publish it.

The Birds Poised to Fly · ★★★★
Inspired by Highsmith's own holiday affair with a female British doctor who then never replied to her letters, it's the story of a man who reacts to being disappointed in love with a cruel deception. One of the stand-outs for me.

The Terrapin · ★★★★
The most brutal of the stories included, it's about a child standing up to his overbearing and belittling mother when she brings home a turtle he mistakes as an unexpected present of a pet, but which is actually meant to be cooked for dinner. Violent and irrational, the ending to this one was superbly chilling.

When the Fleet Was in at Mobile · ★★★★½
Graham Greene singles this one out as his favorite in the introduction, and I'm inclined to agree. A woman chloroforms her tyrannical and alcoholic husband, leaving him for dead, and makes a break for freedom... but as we should by now know, there are rarely happy endings in Highsmith's mind.

The Quest For Blank Claveringi · ★★½
Easily the most bizarre of the bunch, it's about a man who travels to a remote island with the dream of discovering a new species of snails to name after himself. It's another story where the protagonist is menaced by shelled gastropods; in this case, giant man-eating ones.

The Cries Of Love · ★★★
Another odd, but ultimately rather forgettable one. Two elderly women who desperately fear dying alone and can't bear being apart take delight in destroying the other's most prized possessions.

Mrs. Afton, Among Thy Green Braes · ★★
If I had to pick, this one would be my least favorite, not because it's bad, but rather because it completely failed to make an impression one way or the other'I had to check my book to even remember what it was about. A well-mannered, middle-aged lady consults a psychiatrist on behalf of her husband.

The Heroine · ★★★★½
My other favorite in the collection was actually the story against which Highsmith measured all of her writing in the 1940s'she was so pleased with it that she eventually came to see it as a curse, as she felt that it overshadowed her output for a whole decade. A young and eager nanny loves her new family and the children in her care so much that she wants nothing more than a chance to prove her devotion...

Another Bridge to Cross · ★★★
Yet another instance where I had to check the book to remember what this one was about. I enjoyed it while reading it, but it clearly wasn't very memorable: An American man is adrift in Europe following the loss of his wife and son.

The Barbarians · ★★★½
I can imagine this being one of the overlooked ones, but it was one of the tales that made me the most anxious, perhaps because its mundanity made it all the more relatable. It explores what's essentially bullying, and the strain that a constant threat of violence puts on someone.

The Empty Birdhouse · ★★★
In a story that was a bit of a suburban nightmare come true, featuring a slight touch of the supernatural, an unknown, evil-looking animal spotted first in their empty birdhouse reminds a couple old their repressed guilt.