The Other
by Thomas Tryon
Blurb:
Holland and Niles Perry are identical thirteen-year-old twins. They are close-- close enough, almost, to read each other’s thoughts, but they couldn’t be more different. Holland is bold and mischievous, a bad influence, while Niles is kind and eager to please, the sort of boy who makes parents proud. The Perrys live in the bucolic New England town their family settled centuries ago, and as it happens, the extended clan has gathered at its ancestral farm this summer to mourn the death of the twins’ father in a most unfortunate accident. Mrs. Perry still hasn’t recovered from the shock of her husband’s gruesome end and stays sequestered in her room, leaving her sons to roam free. As the summer goes on, though, and Holland’s pranks become increasingly sinister, Niles finds he can no longer make excuses for his brother’s actions.
My Reaction:
It took me a while to finish The Other, but I did enjoy it!
The book gets off to a slow start, but I hesitate to complain about the pacing, since some of the slower, more extraneous elements of the novel were actually my favorite parts. Certain passages are beautifully written, pleasantly evocative... Almost the kind of thing where you want to climb into the book and live there for a while, except that there's something slightly off the whole time in this book's world, and you aren't sure you'd make it out alive!
There's a strong sense of nostalgia (for childhood, but particularly for childhood during a period well before my own birth!) woven through the "slow" parts of the book, and I'd hate to have missed out on them. The normal, almost-idyllic childhood moments contrast well with the horror of the story, too, but there's no denying that the first good chunk of the book is slow-moving.
Aspects of the novel are predictable, it's true, though the major twist, which probably should have been obvious to a reader in 2020, didn't even occur to me until soon before it was revealed. I was too busy thinking about other things (such as the identity of the narrator and what would happen by the book's end, rather than what may have happened before the story starts).
In any event, I found it a good read in the genre of "literary horror" (or at least more literary than most horror).
One more thing, though. There were times where I felt a kind of mental whiplash over the age of the twins. I couldn't remember exactly how old they were-- 12 or 14, I thought... the blurb says 13-- because they seem by turns to act too young or too old for their age.
I guess maybe 13 is a funny age, on the cusp between childhood and the teen years, but there were a few times when I thought one or the other of the twins seemed to behave oddly for their age-- either too immature or with a little too much knowledge of the ways of the world. One or the other is fine, but to go back and forth was discombobulating.
Maybe I was mixing up the twins, earlier in the book, before I'd really settled in. I can well believe that Niles is a "young 13" and Holland a dirty-minded, older-than-his-years type of 13-year-old. (I think we can all agree that-- mercifully!-- neither of the two are a typical 13-year-old boy! Still, it took me out of the story repeatedly, stopping to think, "Wait a minute... How old is this kid, anyway?!")
