Patricia Highsmith, The Black House

The Black House is a collection of eleven short stories by Patricia Highsmith. They are all a little dark, which is hardly surprising given the author's tendency to dwell on the uglier side of human nature. In these pages, unpleasant people do unpleasant things, or they make questionable decisions in the face of unusual circumstances. (In the book's first story, for example, a friendly Scrabble game is interrupted when the cat drags in part of a human hand.) I love the author's novels and have read all or most of them. But while these stories are fine, worth reading if you're a Highsmith fan, ultimately I doubt I'll remember them.