As I picked up the book for the second time, I didn’t remember their details or the twists and turns in the plot, so the book felt somewhat new however, like a watchdog in the night, I read with hyper vigilance over the behavior of all the characters, their interactions and Tryon’s narrative complexity. With Rosemary and The Exorcist’s 11-year-old Regan, we know what we are dealing with, the one witchcraft and the other demonic possession, but not so with The Other‘s twins, Niles and Holland Perry. Two other famous horror novels/movies of the time likely ring a more familiar bell, Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin published in 1967 (the successful movie starred Mia Farrow as Rosemary) and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty in 1971 (the movie’s theme song, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, ever after has heralded a satanic presence). This creepy story was published in 1971, and according to Tryon’s New York Times obituary, it held the New York Times best-seller list for more than six months and sold more than 3.5 million copies. All these years I’ve needed to reread the book. Taking the words from author Dan Chaon, who writes the afterword in the NYRB Classics edition, the story “messed with my head.” No other book in my lifetime of reading left me so unforgettably rattled, and it was not as much over the story as for how Thomas Tryon pulled it off, so effectively shattering my sense of control. I was 16 years old when I first read Thomas Tryon’s best-selling debut, The Other.
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