The stories in Eleven are small masterpieces of Patricia Highsmith’s particular art—that of obsession and foreboding, of probing the dark corners of the human psyche. From the eerily outlandish (a man suffocated by countless snails) to the irrational and brutal (a child’s revenge on his mother for cooking his pet turtle), Eleven presents a gallery of bizarre characters, each driven by strange, unspoken urges, and their cumulative effect is at least as unsettling as any of her novels. publisher page