Patricia Highsmith deploys the iconography of windows in The Cry of the Owl (1962) to indicate sites of liminality whereby she questions what constitutes ‘normalcy’ in mid-twentieth-century America. When protagonist Robert Forester, formerly of New York City, peers clandestinely into the kitchen window of Jenny Thierolf’s rural house near Langley, Pennsylvania, he projects a tableau of domestic tranquility far different than his own tortured life. As their relationship progresses, however, his solipsism becomes apparent, while Highsmith simultaneously exposes the criminality that local residents are willing to condone when confronted with an outsider. The deceptive optics of ‘normalcy,’ in conjunction with specular imagery, is traceable in Highsmith’s other works as well, reinforcing one critic’s observation about ‘the heavily compromised, even reversible binary opposition of deviance and the norm’ in her fiction.