Item: Little Tales of Misogyny
Rating: 3.00
Author: camerontrost

by Patricia Highsmith

With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In the darkly satiric, often mordantly hilarious sketches that make up Little Tales of Misogyny, Highsmith upsets our conventional notions of female character, revealing the devastating power of these once familiar creatures—"The Dancer," "The Female Novelist," "The Prude"—who destroy both themselves and the men around them. This work attests to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).

In this collection, Patricia Highsmith offers us seventeen very short stories about women as victims or perpetrators of unpleasantness, stretching from "The Middle-Class Housewife" to "The Fully Licensed Whore, or, the Wife". Most of these stories are outdated, although that probably depends on what kind of family or community you live in, and so are interesting from a sociological point of view. There are some colourful characters and gruesome endings but not enough kick and definitely not enough twists for this reader's tastes...and we know Highsmith had what it takes to write a killer tale with a nasty twist at the end. Worth a browse if you find a copy at the library or pick one up for cheap somewhere but Patricia Highsmith has plenty of much better work to her name.

Little Tales of Misogyny

by Patricia Highsmith

Reviewed by Cameron Trost on Mar 31, 2016

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