Two brilliant short novels on the theme of a double
life. Although they are worlds apart in scene and
character, both are full of a kind of eerie menace
that lies just beneath the outward events.
Lauren Slaughter’s life began to change beyond
recognition one evening at a dinner party when she
met the quite strange Mr. Van Arkady. “There are
five thousand people in the world,” he said, and he
meant that literally. The other millions, he
asserted, don’t really matter. Lauren,a Fellow at a
respected institute and a student of the politics of
the Persian Gulf, found a second, sinister life for
herself when she met Captain Twilley and Madame
Cybele and began to work for the Jasmine escort
service. Doctor Slaughter is full of social satire
and the promise of violence. It is a Rake’s Progress
dazzlingly translated into a late-twentieth-century
London.
In Doctor DeMarr Gerald DeMarr’s life suddenly
changes one July day when his missing twin brother
George turns up on the doorstep of their
Massachusetts family home and demands to stay. Where
has George been all these years? Before Gerald can
find the answer, he discovers George dead of a drug
overdose. Then, retracing his twin’s footsteps, he
gradually reveals for himself a horrifying - - and
quite nearby -- life that George has led and has
tried to escape from. And, without willing it,
Gerald is drawn into playing the role of his alter
ego, and he plays it out to the terrible and
unexpected ending. |
