The Horizontal Man
Author(s): Helen Eustis; Charles Finch (Foreword by)
A philandering professor on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in this Edgar Award-winning classic from 1946.
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.
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : Library of America
- : Library of America
- : 0.306175
- : July 2020
- : .71 Inches X 4.89 Inches X 7.95 Inches
- : books
Special Fields
- : Helen Eustis; Charles Finch (Foreword by)
- : Paperback
- : 1
- : English
- : 823/.9/1
- : 230