Thomas Tryon (1) (1926–1991)

Wow. This is about the most truly horrific thing I have read in a long time. Perhaps ever. But it isn't Lovecraftian horror; the clear antecedent is Shirley Jackson. But she was never so visceral. I'm writing this before I read the afterword to the NYRB edition, because I want to capture my thoughts fresh. This book has one horrific shock after another, although after the first two or three, you realize more are coming, so you are a bit prepared. No spoilers, but the foreshadowing is pretty clear in hindsight or even as you are reading. You just don't know exactly how or when the shock will come, but when it does, it still makes you want to put down the book and refresh your drink. The other thing that makes this story about twins very different is the way in which it is told. The narrative voice is certainly unusual in how it shapes the story and resets our expectations. This is a book that you can really spend a long time thinking about afterwards. Horror like this, frankly, has much more impact on me as a reader than Lovecraftian horror, even as much as I love some of Lovecraft's work (particularly The Shadow Over Innsmouth). I recently reviewed the Penguin collection of Thomas Ligotti's first two story collections. They are well written and some are quite clever, but the world they describe isn't real and no amount of nice wordsmithing can make it so. But the events in The Other, no matter how terrible they are, have the aura of truth about them. Again...wow.… (more)

Some books have such compelling action that I get completely sucked in, reading to find out what’s next, what’s going to happen on that next page. This is not that kind of book. Instead, it is a slow burning, wonderfully atmospheric story that sucked me into the mysterious events and curious characters, so that I kept reading because I wanted to know more, to mine the hints and subtleties to find out *why* people were doing and saying and events and stories were not matching up. I am not a fast reader, and with baseball games having started, I’m slower than ever, which is why it’s significant that I finished a 400 page hardcover in only four days. And that’s literally all I can think of to say without spoiling the whole plot.

This novel is not without its problems. It is certainly dated, but I wouldn’t say that it hasn’t aged well. More that it is an excellent snapshot of the cultural issues and fascinations of early 1970’s mainstream America. Although I have never studied the history of feminism, I am willing to bet that a modern feminist scholar would find a lot to dissect here.

One last thought. I first read this book when I was not quite a preteen, because it was all the rage at the time and my parents never noticed when I snuck their adult fiction off the shelf after they were done with it. They never would have let me read the novel equivalent of an R rated movie. So I didn’t have the maturity or the base knowledge to understand a lot of it (no internet in the 70’s and children were much more naïve then), and I’d forgotten most of the plot, so in some ways I was coming to this book unspoiled. And I’m glad of it. This book had been left on my parents’ bookshelves for 40 years, until I found it mixed into a box of my grandmother’s books, when my mother chose to give them to me as keepsakes rather than throwing them out. I was delighted to find it, and now I’m even more delighted after having reread it as an adult.

Previous Updates:
Pg 50: http://sheric.booklikes.com/post/1540577/harvest-home-progress-50-401-pg
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Having read the author's 'Harvest Home' many years ago I was prepared for another novel of creeping horror and by and large that is what is delivered. Set in 'the old days' but with cars and movie theatres - and it eventually seems from internal clues that it is the period between the two World Wars (confirmed quite late on when two tombstones are shown with their dates that it is actually 1935) - this is the story of twin boys, one of whom is the evil twin, Holland, and the other, Niles, the good one. Except it is not that simple. For a start, there is a framing mechanism from the beginning where someone is commenting on the story- and this repeats at the beginning of each part and also at the very end - where it soon becomes clear that this person lives in an insitution, which creates a strong suspicion that this is either a mental home or a penal institution of some kind, and also of the narrator's identity.

In the first part of the story the slow narrative gradually makes clear that a series of "accidents" have befallen members of the Perry family - first, their father was killed by a falling trapdoor in the barn and then Holland nearly fell into the well while hanging his grandmother's cat. Shortly afterwards, Holland poisons the pet rat belonging to their cousin Russell - he and his parents have been living there since the father's funeral - and then another family tragedy ensues. The events are largely seen through the eyes of Niles who interacts with his brother, and we learn that their grandmother taught them a 'game' of projecting themselves onto features of nature or animals/birds to become those things. Except Niles is entirely too good at it and everything follows on from there.

There is a huge reveal at the end of part 2 which makes it clear that this is not a story of the supernatural. The trouble is, having seen lots of modern movies and read a lot of books, once this occurs the rest of the story becomes entirely predictable and, for me, a bit boring. The things that happen to other family members are horrible, but I resigned myself to various characters being bumped off in various ways and it all became rather routine. There is good characterisation and a lot of good scenesetting although the prose does drift towards the purple from time to time, but it lacked a sense of driving forward and drifted rather to the conclusion when things began to pick up a bit. So a 3-star rating for me.… (more)