Even the weaker stories have a spirited feel, and illuminate Highsmith's development.
In a collection this long, a few of the weaker stories could have been cast aside to make a tighter whole.
The complaints grow steadily more frequent, alternating with bursts of the cloying sentimentality that mars so many of Thurber's weaker stories.
The weaker stories in the volume are contrived, predictable exercises with a gruesome veneer: a lonely widower who buys some pet rats to keep him company and is soon living in a house filled with 1,300 of the creatures; a rich, lonely divorc who develops a crush on her plastic surgeon and wants him to give her improvements he might like himself.
As in her last collection ("Naked to the Waist," 1991), the weaker stories in this volume tend to rely too insistently on sudden ironic plot twists to expose her characters' illusions, twists and turns that underscore Ms. Dark's authorial role as an O. Henryesque puppeteer.
But all this prowess is in aid of a weak story, in which the audience never has a stake.
Sometimes, cute personality serves in place of jokes, as with the weak story of her rescuing a six-toed cat.
This is from "Jack-O" (published in Esquire last year as "Just Before the Black"), which, to be fair, is the weakest story here.
The rest of the package is a little light for the price – not many different modes, a weak story – but the core is solid and charmingly offbeat.
Two more weeks were taken by Frederick Ashton's "Sylvia," a wonderful work with a weak story, and Kenneth MacMillan's "Romeo and Juliet," a terrific story with too few dance opportunities of real poetry.
