John Gross
''The Black House'' brings together 11 Highsmith short stories. Only four or five feature an outright crime, the kind you get arrested for; the others take place in a border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. What almost all of them have in common is a high degree of tension, and a seemingly impassive style that in fact plays insidiously on the reader's nerves. . . . Her short stories represent a relatively minor part of her achievement; but within their limits they are almost always compelling, as they are here. -- New York Times