The Black House (28 page)

Authors: Patricia Highsmith

BOOK: The Black House

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P
RAISE FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH

“Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drugâeasy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive. . . . Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter.”

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Time Out

“No one has created psychological suspense more densely and deliciously satisfying.”

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Vogue

“Patricia Highsmith's novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

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The New Yorker

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith's dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose, which puts one in mind of those authors.”

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Newsday

“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

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Time

“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”

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Washington Post Book World

“A writer who has created a world of her ownâa world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. . . . Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

âGraham Greene

“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it.”

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Boston Globe

“Highsmith's novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

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Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evilâpersonal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith's writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilirating.”

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Boston Phoenix

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith's hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

âRobert Towers,
New York Review of Books

First published as a Norton paperback 2004

This collection first published in Great Britain by

William Heinemann Ltd 1981

First published in the United States of America by

Penzler Books 1988 (Warner Books, Inc.)

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Production manager: Amanda Morrison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Highsmith, Patricia, 1921â

The black house / Patricia Highsmith.