Time Out New York
Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug—easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive.

Book Description
"Highsmith's writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted."—Entertainment Weekly With Norton's publication of The Black House, Patricia Highsmith's entire body of work is now back in print. First published in 1981, this volume is one of Highsmith's most nuanced and psychologically suspenseful works. The stories in and The Black House mine classic Highsmith terrain as they sketch the lives of suburban dwellers that appear quite normal at first but unravel to reveal their proximity to the macabre. This collection is a perfect example of Highsmith's view of human nature and a fitting capstone to the reintroduction of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

About the Author
Patricia Highsmith is the author of such classics as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. She died in 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Horrific tragedy becomes disturbingly ordinary in The Black House, a masterful collection of short stories, written during a particularly dark time in Patricia Highsmith's life. As readers will discover, the work eerily evokes the warm familiarities of suburban life: the manicured lawns, the white picket fences, and the local pubs, each providing the backbone for her chilling portraits. Seemingly small indiscretions and infidelities-along with love affairs and murder-consume the characters that commit them. Cycles of destructive jealousy overwhelm the cheating protagonists of "Blow It" and "When in Rome," and the title story explores small-town male camaraderie and the destructive secret it masks. This enthralling collection of eleven stories presents Highsmith at her finest: melancholy, suspenseful, and sizzling with a powerful awareness of human emotion.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Gross

''The Black House'' brings together 11 Highsmith short stories. Only four or five feature an outright crime, the kind you get arrested for; the others take place in a border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. What almost all of them have in common is a high degree of tension, and a seemingly impassive style that in fact plays insidiously on the reader's nerves. . . . Her short stories represent a relatively minor part of her achievement; but within their limits they are almost always compelling, as they are here. -- New York Times

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