Books: "Deep Water", A Novel by Patricia Highsmith, 1957

Returning to Patricia Highsmith is always such a pleasure. And this novel in particular is such a delightful, despite late, "discovery" (thanks to Gillian Flynn.) A suburban marital thriller plays out like a magnificent war of the sexes tragedy where no extreme is incredible. The wife is pushing all the buttons, the husband is taking all the imaginable abuse, and then punishing her by killing others. The killer is both sympathetic and sociopathic. The wife is not a victim, she playfully and spitefully explores the boundaries of someones submission. And despite some critical opinion, this is not a "loveless" marriage that both characters are trapped in. A fatal marriage never is. One of the characters, in this case the man, is pathologically in love. And he is quietly destroying both -- himself and Her -- one chilling murder after another. Immediately after the second murder, Vic Van Allen, goes to a school concert to hear their daughter sing. He hands in his ticket at the entrance and the ticket says "Admit two". Highsmith's sense of humor is superb - it never fails to bring chills in the appreciating reader.

Books: Gone Girl. A Novel by Gillian Flynn, 2012

It is a smart, well written novel in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith. It is very hard to follow in her footsteps but Ms Flynn manages to do that pretty well. The novel follows a very complex structure and especially in the second half when the "trick" with Amy's diary is revealed, walks on the razor's edge trying to balance logic and conflicting psychological motivations. Often it seems the author is almost about to trip switching between the narratives of He and She but eventually manages to pull it off neatly, collect all loose ends and turn it all into one huge metaphor of male-female love-hate stand-off and psychological warfare. “One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness” Patricia Highsmith is quoted to have said...Ms Flynn's novel is an intricate illustration of that statement with a little bit of Porfiry Petrovich thrown in -- his role being played by a female local cop...The language is witty with that type of wittiness that misleadingly steers the reader into "chick-lit" territory only to make them realize later that this genre affiliation is severely ironically undermined.