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Book List: Doubles and Doppelgangers

Our shadows may seem insubstantial, but their reach is long, and they are always with us (except for the one in Andersen’s “The Shadow“. Our reflections may not reveal what we hope for: sometimes, as with the hobgoblin’s mirror in Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, beauty is distorted into ugliness. It’s no wonder that it is unsettling to discover a shadow self– either a nearly perfect double, or a dark half (or sometimes both).  They’re everywhere in literature, from Shakespeare to Shelley. The next time you’re feeling lonely, try one of these out.

 

Weep No More, My Lady by Mary Higgins Clark

This suspenseful mystery centers on Elizabeth Lange, whose sister, the famous actress Leila LaSalle, was recently murdered. Leila’s fiance, wealthy businessman Ted Winters, is on trial for her murder, and Elizabeth will soon testify at his trial. Despite this, Elizabeth accepts an invitation from Ted to spend several days at a luxury spa in California, where she discovers that Ted is not the only one with a motive for murder. While there’s no physical double for either of the main characters, an unexpected similarity is key to the mystery.

 

An Artificial Night by Seanan McGuire

This is the third book in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye urban fantasy series, which presents a world where Faerie and contemporary human society intersect. October is a changeling, with a background as a private detective, and she does a great job at getting herself into deadly situations. In this book, her Fetch, an exact double named May Daye, appears. Typically, a Fetch is an omen of death,and naturally, it’s disconcerting to have an omen of death following you around,  but May becomes an entertaining and well-developed character. Since there are additional books, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that October survives the book and May follows her into the next one. McGuire also does a fabulous job writing about doubles and reflections in the two books Indexing and Indexing: Reflections.

 


The Second Lady by Irving Wallace

I first read this political thriller in middle school in the 1980s, and it was slightly more plausible then. It’s a little dated now, but still holds up well, so long as you remember that it does, in fact, take place in the early 1980’s (the most recent president mentioned is Carter) and has absolutely no connection to reality. The premise is that a Soviet intelligence agent discovers an actress, Vera Vavilova, who is almost a perfect physical double of the American First Lady, Billie Bradford. He trains Vera to be a perfect double in every way, good enough to step right into Billie’s shoes at a sensitive time in negotiations between America and the U.S.S.R.  The plot is clunky, but the idea is pretty awesome, and the conclusion is chilling to think about.

 

Stranger With My Face by Lois Duncan

In this YA title, Laurie, who has morphed into a lovely teenage girl over the summer, discovers she is adopted and has a twin who she can reach through astral projection. Of course, no good can come from this. It is creepy as all get out, and if you ever wished for a twin, you won’t do it again after you finish this book.

 


Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Our nameless narrator describes how wealthy widower Maximilian de Winter swept her away from her cares, married her, and took her to his estate, Manderley, leaving her to the tender mercies of the hostile housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers clearly worshipped Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, and there is great mystique about her, and mystery about her untimely demise. As her insecurities about her marriage grow, the second Mrs. de Winter becomes increasingly obsessed with Rebecca.

 

The Dark Half by Stephen King

The Dark Half is almost semi-autobiographical. Just about the time it was published, King announced he was retiring his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. In the book, writer Thad Beaumont has been successfully writing gory thrillers under the pseudonym George Stark. When Beaumont decides to kill off George Stark, he does not go gently. Instead, he comes fully to life, and goes on a murderous rampage. This isn’t King’s best book, but it is memorable, and a heck of a story.

 

Dopplegangster by Laura Resnick

This is the second book in the Esther Diamond urban fantasy series (I recommend starting with Disappearing Nightly, the first one). Esther is a different kind of urban fantasy protagonist: she’s an aspiring actress who waitresses part-time at a mob-owned restaurant, hangs out with an ancient magician named Max and a retired wiseguy named Lucky, and she might be involved with the policeman in charge of the Organized Crime Unit. More of an entertainer than a badass, somehow she always ends up entangled in supernatural events. In Doppelgangster, Esther witnesses the murder of a mobster just after an exact double appears in the restaurant she is working in. As more doubles pop up, followed by murders of the originals, Esther and her friends search for the solution to the crimes, ending up in absurd situations along the way. For humor, mystery, and the paranormal, with a touch of romance, you can’t go wrong.

 


The Willow Files, vol. 2 by Yvonne Navarro

This out-of-print book focuses on episodes from the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer that put an emphasis on the character of Willow, and includes the novelization of Doppelgangland, where Willow meets her doppelganger, identical in appearance, but from an alternate dimension in which she is a bored, charismatic, and very evil vampire.

 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

You can’t go wrong with a classic. Dr. Henry Jekyll experiments on himself with a potion that is supposed to divide him into “good” and “evil” individuals temporarily. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hyde, his dark and unexpectedly violent alter ego, has no intention of reintegrating with Dr. Jekyll.

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Don’t write this off because it has achieved the status of a classic: it is absolutely chilling. Dorian Gray is a young man, angelic in appearance, with an excess of charisma. He’s also selfish and manipulative. An artist in love with Dorian paints an extraordinary portrait of him, which turns out to possess an unsettling quality: it takes on the evidence of age and the ugliness that would otherwise appear in his face, leaving him looking forever young and handsome as he commits more and more unspeakable acts. The portrait, however, becomes a hideous reflection of his true self.

 


Coraline by Neil Gaiman

In this extremely creepy children’s book, Coraline has just moved into a new house with parents that more or less ignore her, and bizarre neighbors nearby. As she explores the house, she finds a door in the wall that leads her to the family of her dreams. They’re almost like her parents, except they’re attentive and loving, and oh yes, they have buttons for eyes. Obviously, no good can come from this. I’m just going to say that the Other Mother, with her button eyes, has always creeped me out– so much so that I had to hide my daughter’s Lalaloopsy doll.

 

 

Posted on July 1, 2016 by , Reply

Murder Most Foul: Violent Death in Children’s Literature

The Boston Globe just published an interview with Michelle Ann Abate, a professor at Ohio State University who has just published a book about the tradition of murder and violence in children’s literature (a really interesting take on the “scaring the children” theme). I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the interviewer edited the interview for publication, but for some reason both he and she come across as seeming surprised that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature, and she’s actually quoted as saying that “the story of violence and books for young readers hasn’t been told before”.

I have to say that I am surprised at the surprise that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature. It’s a frequent reason that books are banned (although racism, explicit sexual situations, and profanity currently top that). Going back in history, even after you progress past Grimm’s fairy tales, there’s no lack of violence and death. Andersen’s tales often end with death. “The Little Match Girl”, for instance, freezes to death on the street.

 

Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is a classic children’s book, with lovely illustrations. Here’s one for a story about a girl with matches who burns to death!

 

 

And let’s not forget the Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Poor Kate! Childhood used to be a much different creature than it is today, a point that Abate does make, and attitudes toward parenting tended toward the didactic and scaring kids into behaving. It is interesting to note, though, that Hoffman wrote the book to entertain his young child, and in spite of the terrifying stories and illustrations, there are a lot of adults who remember it as being funny when they were kids.  There’s a darkness inside children that a lot of grownups don’t want to admit is there.

“K is for Kate who was struck with an axe”

Moving on to more recent times, we have the parents of the kids in  Julian Thompson’s The Grounding of Group 6, who send their kids to a school that guarantees they’ll be permanently lost in the woods; the viciousness of the children in William Sleator’s House of Stairs; the matter-of-fact euthanasia of children and the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver;  the government approved murders of “extra” children in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden; the chilling account of the Holocaust in The Devil’s Arithmetic;  the supernatural terrors from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Death, and especially murder, can be scary in books, but nowhere near as scary as daily life. Processing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a lot more difficult for my kids than processing The Tailypo. 

Many people– librarians, critics, parents, academics– have considered the story of violence in children’s books. Nearly every year there’s at least one article about how children’s literature has gotten too dark. I would say that it’s an aspect that people either choose to avoid (it’s not difficult to avoid children’s books containing murders) or take for granted. When something like The Hunger Games or Goosebumps becomes massively popular, violence in children’s books comes into the spotlight, but even when it’s not in the spotlight, there are people who notice it, study it, and write about it. I think as transmedia platforms become more popular we’ll see more of this come to light, as books and visual media connect in more ways than ever, and this is definitely a topic worth paying attention to… but if the study of violence in children’s literature hasn’t been noticed before, it’s only because people didn’t want to see what was really there.

Posted on August 28, 2013 by , Reply

What Was I Scared Of? and Other Dreadful Tales

I’ve come to see that there is often a difference between what is marketed as children’s horror and what they find truly unsettling. Horror is an atmospheric medium, so illustrations and artwork(even those you might not expect) can terrify on their own or interact with language to create a sense of dread. Following R.L. Stine’s philosophy, it can be written to be so fantastical that it’s a thrilling scare, easily separated from the real, with a billboard on it letting kids know “Hey, this is scary!” Or, it can tap into real fears, but in unreal ways (some, I am sure, that the author never imagined), as this article suggests. The comments are surprising (or maybe not). What’s even more interesting is the adult perspective on reading these books not just as children but to them. The Story of Babar, for instance, is mentioned multiple times in the comments as scary and unsettling to both children and adults reading to children because of the scene in which Babar’s mother is killed, but I don’t remember that at all. From looking at the comments, it’s clear that what inspires dread or fear is often very individual… but certain authors and books do stick out. The Velveteen Rabbit, Love You Forever, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Der Struwwelpeter, The Giving Tree, Curious George, The Five Chinese Brothers, and The Runaway Bunny top the list, and it seems that the works of Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Hans Christian Andersen should be handled with care.

Here are some of the titles (not specifically listed above) that people mentioned. Did, or do, any of these disturb you or your child?

The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, and The Robber Bridegroom by Hans Christian Andersen
Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans
The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Olivia by Ian Falconer
Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman
The Duel by Eugene Field
Only One Woof by James Herriott
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
I Stink! by Kate McMullan
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parrish
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Helen Oxenbury
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Roly Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter
Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann
The Cat in the Hat, I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew, and What Was I Scared Of? from The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss
Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, Kenny’s Window and Higgelty, Piggelty, Pop! There Must be More to Life! by Maurice Sendak
A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon
The Starry Messenger by Peter Sis
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and The Amazing Bone by William Steig
Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Mama? by Jeanette Winter
The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright

If none of these fit the bill for you or the kids you know, which ones did, and why? Comment below and let me know!

Posted on November 30, 2012 by , Reply