Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives
by Sarah Weinman
This is a great compendium of short domestic thriller stories written by women and edited by Sarah Weinman. Standouts in the anthology include Vera Caspary's "Sugar and Spice," almost a novella, a deftly told complicated love quadrangle in which two cousins play out a lifelong rivalry; Helen Nielsen's "Don't Sit Under the Appletree" in which a woman is terrorized by 4 a.m. phone calls that are even more terrifying when she finds out whom they're from; Margaret Millar's "The People Across the Canyon," which could have been a great Twilight Zone episode; and an early short story by Patricia Highsmith, "The Heroine," which in which a young nanny, who seems just a hair "off" in the beginning is slowly revealed to be quite mad.
Weinman's introduction to the anthology and to each author are interesting, if rather breezy and biographical rather than analytical, but she has selected a nice collection of authors for those who want to explore this genre more. Like me.
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