Creepy snails, weird forests

New releases

ELEVEN
Patricia Highsmith
Bloomsbury
192 pages
Rs 340

This is a well-deserved reissue of a collection of eleven macabre short stories by Patricia Highsmith, who was a master of the form. Though best known today for her suspense novels featuring the amoral Tom Ripley, and for Strangers on a Train, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted into one of his greatest films, some of the finest qualities of Highsmith's writing can be seen in her shorter pieces.

Notable among the stories in this collection is "The Terrapin", about a little boy, his ill-tempered mother and the doomed terrapin that has been brought home for dinner; Graham Greene likened this story to Saki's masterpiece "Sredni Vashtar", which was also about an adult's indifference to a child's feelings.

Other highlights include the almost indescribably (yet matter-of-factly) creepy "The Snail Watcher", in which a seemingly innocuous hobby leads, in just a few pages, to horrific consequences; "The Nanny", and "When the Fleet Was in at Mobile".

SWITCHEROOS!: TOPSY-TURVY MYSTERIES OF MARKIPOSA
Swati Chanda
Puffin
Rs 195
144 pages (with 30 illustrations)

The oddest, strangest, weirdest, most astonishing things happen in the hustling, bustling forest of Markiposa: Lennox Felix Jelani, the lion prince, loses his roar while chasing a deer into the Valley of Echoes. Chiku the monkey and his naughty friends suddenly give up their monkey tricks to become oh-so-serious and sombre.

Carlos the crow turns rainbow-coloured, vultures and wolves turn vegetarian, queen bee Abiba is puzzled by reports of honey that's bitter and Nayomi the elephant does what an elephant never ever does "" she forgets even her way around the forest!

Then Enzo the zebra's stripes are gone, but where? It falls upon Rinzin the friendly dragon to get to the bottom of all the small and big mysteries of Markiposa. As puzzle after puzzle is solved in this collection of imaginative stories, the curious forest comes abuzz with startling surprises and higgledy-piggledy happenings.