Certain recurring concepts dominate horror fiction, and most of them make perfect sense. The vampire, the ghost, the psychotic killer, the werewolf—these and their frightening companions in the horror canon have stood the test of time, have scared many generations, and will scare many more.
But there is one horror concept that is much harder to grasp. It dispenses with monsters and villains and things that go bump in the night. It finds horror in the most commonplace and familiar element of our day-to-day life, as unexceptional as the back of our hand and our gaze in the mirror. Yet, it may be the most disturbing of any of the horrors, all the more unsettling for its very guise of normalcy.
I am speaking of the double . What an odd starting point for horror, yet the literature is filled with scary stories built on this concept. Edgar Allan Poe delivered a masterpiece of the genre in his story "William Wilson," whose narrator is harassed by a rival who presents a perfect imitation of himself—yet he is the only person who can recognize this sly mimicry. But the double is never an exact double, and often represents a darker alternative self. We see this in classic horror fiction from Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Robert Bloch's Psycho . And we can trace it back even earlier in myths—Narcissus, Romulus and Remus, and so many other traditional accounts involving twins or siblings—built on the familiar notion that our greatest adversary may look exactly like ourselves. In the foundational story of Judeo-Christian belief systems, Cain kills Abel—the first murder story drawing on this sense of a dangerous reciprocity.
At first glance, the Double seems a fairly tame villain, certainly not as formidable an adversary as, say, Count Dracula or the Frankenstein monster. But it possesses one quality that those others lack. You can run away from a vampire, but how can you escape the horror that is so close to you that it could very well inhabit your own skin? This is the most existential horror of them all.
Such is the horror at the heart of Thomas Tryon’s 1971 novel, The Other . Tryon enjoyed huge crossover success with this book. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a handful of horror novels managed to break out of the narrow world of genre fiction, and reach a large mainstream audience. But the other books that achieved this crossover success— most notably, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist —needed to enlist Satan himself in their attempts to jar the sensibilities of modern audiences. Tryon, in contrast, relied on something far simpler and more familiar, a pair of twins.
Throughout this novel, Tryon builds suspense from misdirection and understatement. The key moments of violence in this plot are presented from an oblique angle— sometimes from afar, or in misty flashback, or occasionally only by implication. We are all familiar with genre stories which force readers to decipher clues in order to guess who committed the crime, but in The Other even the nature of the transgressions require sleuthing. We are equally aware of stories with unreliable narrators, but Tryon goes a step further in this novel, forcing us to guess the very identity of the person who emerges periodically as the master storyteller.
Even the setting runs counter to the usual settings for horror. Here is no haunted house, no eerie castle, no spooky deserted buildings. Instead, we are invited into a bustling household packed to the brim with extended family—well, at least at first, the number of residents declines precipitously over the course of the story—in a sleepy small town, circa 1935. The most horrible thing on the minds of the community members is a distant crime, namely the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in faraway East Amwell, New Jersey.
But the people in Pequot Landing, Connecticut, the setting of Tryon’s novel, don’t worry much about crime. When a series of deaths and injuries take place at the Perry residence, no one looks for suspects, or even considers that crimes might have been committed. And no one would suspect that twin boys, Holland and Niles Perry, might be responsible for the incidents. The youngsters, after all, are the victims of these tragedies. Their father is now dead, and their mother has turned into a melancholy recluse in the aftermath.
But even the most complacent onlooker can notice something peculiar about the Perry twins. They may look alike, but their personalities could hardly be more different. Niles, the younger (by a few minutes) of the two, is a model child, helpful and considerate. But Holland is aloof and contentious, with a marked cruel streak. Yet despite these obvious differences, the two are fiercely loyal to each other, even to the extent of becoming co-conspirators in the unnatural events at the Perry homestead.
The youngsters have a special talent, taught to them by their grandmother. They can project themselves into other creatures, making the imaginative leap that allows them to understand what it might be to fly like a bird, or strut like a rooster, or even blossom like a flower. Perhaps this is merely a game, a way of expanding personal horizons and envisioning other possible ways of life. But young Niles Perry is too skilled at playing this game—so talented at immersing himself in the other that his own personality can disappear in the process. At this advanced level, his skill turns into a liability, and the youngster is subject to the vicissitudes of the personalities that supplant his own.
Yet who is wise enough to connect this innocent, almost childish game with the unsettling series of tragedies that beset the household? And even if someone suspects, what can be done to stop the viciously unfolding cycle, in which violence triggers more violence?
Thomas Tryon took this subtle, psychologically rich plot and turned it into a runaway hit— The Other would eventually sell 4 million copies and spend six months on the bestseller list. The book is not without its limitations. The prose gets the job done, but without much grace. The descriptions of landscape and sky, flora and fauna, won’t make you forget Cormac McCarthy or Virginia Woolf . But the characters come alive with animating spirit, and the psychological conflicts simmering throughout this novel are both plausible and disturbing.
At the time of its release, The Other earned praise from Anthony Burgess , and comparisons with John Cheever and other highbrow establishment authors. Few horror books have enjoyed such acclaim, but the achievement is all the more remarkable when one considers the author’s background. Tryon had never published a novel before The Other . He was a middle-aged actor, who had enjoyed some modest career successes, largely on the basis of his rugged good looks, suitable for westerns and war movies. You can see him acting alongside John Wayne in The Longest Day , a film about the Normandy landing, or as a cowboy in the TV series Wagon Train and The Big Valley . His biggest acting success, however, came in the role of a Catholic priest in the 1963 film The Cardinal , for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination. (But he suffered under the direction of Otto Preminger, whose treatment of the actor bordered on abuse—at one juncture, he even fired Tryon while his parents looked on.)
But in his mid-40s, Tryon decided that he needed a career change. After all, he had graduated with honors from Yale, and didn’t need to rely on the shrinking opportunities to play handsome screen characters. He thought he might have some success as a film producer, but the studios showed no interest in his pitch for a horror movie about twins. So he devoted more than a year to turning the concept into a novel. The Other eventually became a movie, with a screenplay by Tryon, but he eventually decided that he preferred life away from Hollywood. He had few contacts with the movie industry in the remaining two decades of his life—although he made considerable sums of money selling rights for his stories to the leading studios.
The Other is not a novel about the film industry—not by any measure. Yet it does show the dark side of role-playing, and it is hardly a stretch to view protagonist Niles Perry as master of method acting. The essence of the horror in these pages draws from a simple premise: What happens when you stop playing the role and it starts playing you?
Can we go further, and see Thomas Tryon as projecting himself into the deadly twins who instigate the horrors in this novel? That would make The Other a book of a doubled double. Add to this the complexity Tryon faced in Hollywood as a gay man whose career would be jeopardized if the public learned the details of his private life. He had already dealt with traumatizing situations as an actor, and could envision even worse ones if his personal ‘other’ got exposed in the press.
Perhaps all this explains the emotional intensity of this novel, and how the untried Tryon managed to move so effortlessly from film to the bestseller list. He had been preparing for years to write this kind of horror story—and in the worst possible way: by living it out. And the energy in this book, by the same token, perhaps represents the realization of its author that by moving from the screen to the printed page he had found an escape, away from the limelight of Hollywood and into the imaginative life of the professional storyteller. Readers back in 1971 could hardly have grasped these aspects of The Other , but they could feel its authenticity and passion. And for all of the limitations of this book, they still enliven its pages today.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.