Shadow Twin

by Dale Hoover

Once Jack's life was under control. But that was before the man across the street came knocking on the door...before he saw his son's small body shaking like a rag doll in his own powerful hands. Now Jack's life careens toward chaos, bursting out of him like the ugly ridges on his face. People look at Jack in horror. They know the truth. They can see. But how can he learn the truth when he can't bear to look in the mirror?

(Life brings change)
(Life brings evolution)
Something happened to the face.

Life is being torn out of Jack-sucked into a dark, silent hole for which there is no explanation, no end but the unspeakable end-projected into a stranger at the door:
I am what you made me be

Jack has everything to lose. The madness has begun. Life is evolving into...
SHADOW TWIN

Genres: Horror

389 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

Reviews

[Riley · Rating 2 out of 5]

And two stars is generous. Honestly, I DNF-ed it with 100 pages to go.

From the first page, the prose is insanely over-wrought. It's so heavy/dramatic/tragic that when you find out the source of Johnny B's self-loathing, it could never have lived up to the weight of the prose. Because the narrator is so afflicted from the start, there's no real room to amp things up. I think that's what the best horror books do, is they set a baseline normalcy, and then ride with the characters as that normalcy is broken.

I thought of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's got similar ingredients: A turbulent marriage, a spacial anomaly, a team of researchers. What makes that book so great is the characters clinging to the hope that this is actually something normal that just has yet to be explained. They're in denial, but must eventually face the truth and all its implications.

Shadow Twin dives right in and the characters are immediately on board. They are too willing to simply *believe* something so profoundly abnormal and evil. There's a lot of power in characters knowing something the reader doesn't, and the reader knowing something the characters don't. Shadow Twin tries to accomplish both but succeeds in neither.

The whole mechanism is confusing. There's the dream man and the bogeyman, who is actually some kind of spider. The first person perspective really does this book zero favors. There's a huge swath of the book where you're like, "Where is his wife?"

S P O I L E R S

I was really interested when the burglar breaks in and they end up throwing him down the hole, and it's a smart move to bring Johnny B's ailing dad into the picture, but I wish his falling into the hole had been less of an accident. Johnny can't control his impulses. There's one line in the book that says something like "We can accept anything that is livable" or something, and I feel like that's a real key to JB's, like, ethos, but aside from that one line, it isn't put to use at all.

I am intrigued by the idea of the Abyss series, but this one fell far short of its promise : /

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

For those keeping track, this is book eleven of my Abyss reading project. It's also the eighth book that wasn't completely worthless, but neither does it crack the top three. It's a solidly mediocre book, and is ultimately forgettable.

The book started out well, with good prose and a strong start. It begged comparison to Koja's The Cipher, since, like that book, Shadow Twin is about a mysterious hole that opens inside a house, but that's the only thing similar to the two novels. Where Koja focuses on the two main characters and their obsessions and isolation, Hoover focuses in on the family and their inherent problems, projecting and enhancing them via the hole. I can relate better to Shadow Twin, but it's not enough to make it the better book of the two.

Hoover doesn't write like a typical '90s horror author, with lurid violence and rampant sexism and misogyny. That's definitely a plus, but she doesn't capture her characters well, and her narrative rambles at time. It's written in the first person, as a reflective look back on the main character's decline, but she shifts to a third-person omniscient viewpoint at times, and makes too many references to the horrible things he is yet to do. It's annoying, and doesn't do much for foreshadowing since she keeps repeating that refrain, either at the beginning or end of her chapters.

Shadow Twin is a book that's well written, but the story and plot aren't that great. I prefer it to some of the other dreck that preceded it in the Abyss line, but I wouldn't recommend it.

[Debra]

Stephen King endorsed the entire Dell Abyss Horror line. Here is his blurb:

"Thank you for introducing me to the remarkable line of novels currently being issued under Dell's Abyss imprint. I have given a great many blurbs over the last twelve years or so, but this one marks two firsts: first unsolicited blurb (I called you) and the first time I have blurbed a whole line of books. In terms of quality, production, and plain old story-telling reliability (that's the bottom line, isn't it), Dell's new line is amazingly satisfying...a rare and wonderful bargain for readers. I hope to be looking into the Abyss for a long time to come."

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

first novel i went and bought myself. blew me away.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the scariest books I've ever read. You will never again want to go into an attic.