I was also 16 when I read Rosemary’s Baby. Yet Nile’s was the one who must keep the Secret… He tried not to think about it, tried to put it out of his mind. Niles was sitting and, without thinking, rattling the Prince Albert tin. “Put that away somewhere,” Holland growled.
Is it all just bad luck? A misplacement of tools? Old age? Too much drinking? Carelessness?Įxplanations exist, except it’s unnerving how Holland hovers around the house, the barn and fields with his strange Asiatic smile and cruel, conniving spirit. Meanwhile, kind, thoughtful Niles protects a tobacco tin that holds mysterious treasures: a family ring of a Peregrine hawk given to him by Holland and something special wrapped in blue tissue referred to as The Thing. The story takes place over a hot, dry summer on the Perry family farm in a small Connecticut community.
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.
0 kommentar(er)
