BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TALENTED MIR RIPLEY, CAROL AND STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
‘The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer’ THE TIMES
‘Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable’ WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
‘Easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive’ TIME OUT
Nowhere is Patricia Highsmith’s affinity for animals more apparent than in The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, for here she transfers the murderous thoughts and rages most associated with humans onto the animals themselves.
You will meet, for example, in In the Dead of Truffle Season, a truffle-hunting pig who tries to whet his own appetite for a while; or Jumbo in Chorus Girl’s Absolutely Final Performance, a lonely, old circus elephant who decides she’s had enough of show business and cruel trainers for one lifetime.
In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and breeding rodents are no longer ordinary beings in the happy home, but actually have the power to destroy the world in which we live.
‘The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer’ THE TIMES
‘Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable’ WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
‘Easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive’ TIME OUT
Nowhere is Patricia Highsmith’s affinity for animals more apparent than in The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, for here she transfers the murderous thoughts and rages most associated with humans onto the animals themselves.
You will meet, for example, in In the Dead of Truffle Season, a truffle-hunting pig who tries to whet his own appetite for a while; or Jumbo in Chorus Girl’s Absolutely Final Performance, a lonely, old circus elephant who decides she’s had enough of show business and cruel trainers for one lifetime.
In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and breeding rodents are no longer ordinary beings in the happy home, but actually have the power to destroy the world in which we live.
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Reviews
For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there is no one like Patricia Highsmith
The knee-jerk misanthropy that sometimes man Highsmith's superior suspense is dominant and oppressive here . . . [they] substitute smiling gruesomeness for genuine cleverness or wit.
Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug - easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive . . . [She] belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter
The stories feature small worlds of animal amorality in which the sweet taste of revenge leaves no aftertaste of guilt. It's a rich offering, best sampled in small bites
The No.1 Greatest Crime Writer
One of our greatest modernist writers
A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery
Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable
