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Helen Eustis: The Horizontal Man (paperback and LOA eBook Classic)

Foreword by Charles Finch

“Malice and mental instability lie at the heart of Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man, a dark and disconcerting satire of academic life. . . . It’s postmodern, it’s feminist, and when we laugh, it’s with an edge of unease. The creepy resolution is quite unlike anything that came before it and precious little since.”—Val McDermid, The New York Times Book Review

Overview

Overview

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June 30, 2017

The Horizontal Man was Helen Eustis’s only crime novel, and she won an Edgar Award for it, combining a wildly disparate set of elements into an enduringly fascinating work. In its way it is a classical whodunit that stands comparison with old-school practitioners such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. This mystery transpires in the rarefied precincts of the English department of a venerable New England college, one very much of the restless postwar moment, echoing with references to Freud and Kafka. Eustis finds comedy high and low in a cavalcade of characters bursting at the seams with repressed sexual longings and simmering malice. Beyond the satire, she stirs up—with a narrative whose multiple viewpoints give the book a striking modernistic edge—a troubling sense of the mental chaos lurking just beneath the civilized surfaces of her academic setting.

Helen Eustis (1916–2015) was the author of two novels: The Horizontal Man (1946), which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and The Fool Killer (1954), which was adapted into a 1965 movie of the same name. She later translated works by French authors including Georges Simenon and Christiane Rochefort.

Unabridged Audio Edition: The Horizontal Man, narrated by Barbara Rosenblat, is available from Audible and iBooks (through iTunes). Winner of eight Audies, Barbara Rosenblat (Orange is the New Black) is one of the most respected and popular narrators of audiobooks in the country. The audiobook includes commentary by Sarah Weinman, editor of Women Crime Writers and an authority on mystery-suspense fiction.

The Horizontal Man is also included in the Library of America collection Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s, edited by Sarah Weinman.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-631-7 316 pages

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Helen Eustis: The Horizontal Man (paperback and LOA eBook Classic)

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