The Other by Thomas Tryon
|
Our Price: $49.78 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $8.05 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Other
Book Review: One of the best...
Summary: 5 Stars
[...]
Thomas Tryon was first a move star...and a very talented and good-looking one at that. I remember him well. "The Other", in my opinion, is truly one of the best horror books ever written. It has been some years since I read it...but I've never forgotten Mr's Tryon's ability to truly capture your attention and keep you guessing what was really going on. His artistic ability as an author is not as well-known as should be. He passed away some time ago...Sadly...for who knows what other wonderful works we may have seen by this great writer and talented actor. If you haven't read this one, and you are a horror fan, you should read it. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.
Book Review: The other side of the looking glass
Summary: 4 Stars
The anxieties stoked by the rebellion of the baby boomers in the late Sixties (particularly after the Manson Family murders at the end of the decade) gave rise to all kinds of horror fictions and films about evil children in the early part of the next decade; this 1971 atmospheric novel by Thomas Tryon was one of the best, and most influential. You can trace many later developments in horror fiction--particularly Tryon's very flexible use of an informal and dreamlike first-person narrative--to this early book which was a huge bestseller in its day, and is still a marvel for how well it is told and for how efficiently its horrors come ticking along. It is now available in a beautiful re-issue edition from the Centipede Press.
Tryon was an extremely handsome Hollywood leading man whose career largely began to bottom out at around the same time the late 60s and early 70s boom in horror was signaled by the Ira Levin novel ROSEMARY'S BABY and its subsequent film adaptation by Roman Polanski. Inspired by that film, Tryon tried his hand at writing a novel based on his childhood memories of rural Connecticut and came up with this finely constructed story of personality transference among a pair of twins living there during the Depression. (The idea of the evil doppelganger goes back to Poe and Dostoevski, of course, but seems quite relevant coming from a gay man who had been living in the public eye in the 60s as a movie star.) The 1973 Richard Mulligan film adaptation, for which Tryon himself wrote the screenplay, has perhaps become today more famous than the novel itself, but the novel is really better, as Ramsey Campbell points out in his brief introduction to this edition: the sense of the drowsy longeurs of summer are stretched out a bit more, and the crucial "game" that the twins play with their grandma and its connection to the major events of the novel are clarified. This is an excellent example of how finely and intelligently genre fiction can be crafted.
Book Review: Very Good, But Not Scary
Summary: 4 Stars
For a while now I've been searching for the horror novel that would scare me witless. This is one of the books that regularly shows up on various lists and discussions of the most frightening novels. It must be said that if you're a mother or grandmother of tween boy(s), then I can imagine some nightmares resulting from this book; however, for me, it just wasn't scary.
That said, the book is quite well written, and if the few first-person introductory pages look like red flags for a down-homier-than-thou slog through a painful pastiche of dialect prose, trust that it isn't. The author's style is unusual, perhaps half of the dialogue isn't in quotation marks, which is something I have little tolerance for, yet the author pulls it off quite well. The style feels like a third-person narrative with unintended first-person musings woven through, quite subtly, which is probably exactly what the author was going for.
Once the story got rolling, it becomes compelling and engrossing. "The Other" is a Very Good Novel. If I hadn't been hoping so strongly for goosebumps and being afraid to sleep with the light off, I would have given it five stars.
One should note that the book should be approached with lowered expectations of the ferocity and breadth of the violence: Tryon makes no attempt to be graphic or shocking. This novel is more like true crime, where a single, bloodless death is a horrific tragedy. "The Other" feels real and prosaic; it's not fantastical horror; it's not a slasher novel.
Book Review: Simply NOT that good.
Summary: 2 Stars
I really wanted this to be a better book, especially when faced with all the "Wait until you get to the TWIST!" comments I had heard. Um, well, I assumed what the "TWIST" was about 10 pages into the book.
Great idea, just overwrought prose and not nearly creepy enough.
Book Review: Not a fan.
Summary: 1 Stars
A mediocre story plagued by poor writing. The ending is too obvious. The gypsy game is a redundant plot element - the same effect is achieved by the fact that the boys are twins. The author seems to take the easy way out: he neither assumes a POV nor does the plot justify the unnanounced changes in POV.
*SPOILER* The only enjoyable part of the novel I found was the final scene. At least the demise of the infant was inventive.