I really, REALLY like Patricia Highsmith. I think I've read almost all her short story collections over the course of six months. You'll be hard-pressed to convince me that there's someone who writes better short stories.

This collection is composed of stories that were found in her archives after her death and was assembled posthumously. Many were stories that had been published previously and uncollected, but a few were things that hadn't been published before. This also illustrates her taste as much as anything else, because this huge volume is far weaker than any of the other collections I've read by her.

There's still some fantastic stories in here, though. One of my favorites is a really ridiculous story about a rather ostentatious man who collects counterfeit paintings, and explains his affinity for them to a woman by completely disassembling his body and proving that almost all his parts are false. It's... bizarre and unexpected, to say the least, and the ending is somewhat out of sync with the rest of the story, something else I liked about it.

Her depictions of people continues to be spot on, though. One of the stories in this collection is about two women of different classes whose eyes meet and both know immediately that the upper-class woman is jealous of the other, who is meeting her lover. Another story is the shortened version of "Cries of Love," a favorite of mine from another collection, but it benefits from the ending she gave it in the collected version. Another is about a woman who collects a series of marriage proposals in the week she spends at a ski resort before she kills herself for being spurned by her lover.

The weakness in a lot of these stories mostly comes from the fact they feel less finished than the ones in the other collections. It seems like they only tell part of a story, and it makes the others seem that much better, because... well, I like her for the rather twisted people she writes, and these have them, but it's like the people don't quite ever finish what they're doing, and it makes the stories slightly less.

These are all definitely worth reading, but I think it does best after all her other collections. ( )

Didn't like Strangers on a Train, decided not to read this one