Slowly, slowly, ‘Darwin’s finches of the snail world’ return from near extinction

Slowly, slowly, ‘Darwin’s finches of the snail world’ return from near extinction

In Patricia Highsmith’s unnerving 1964 short story “The Snail-Watcher,” a broker’s quiet fascination with breeding garden snails curdles into a terrifying biological reckoning that ends with him entombed by his own neglected and ever-multiplying subjects. The tale, a claustrophobic master class in the hubris of human interference, offers a bleak twist on the frailty of humanity’s supposed dominion over nature.