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Overview
Bennie Rosato looks exactly like her identical twin, Alice Connelly, but the darkness in Alice's soul makes them two very different women. Or at least that's what Bennie believes—until she finds herself buried alive at the hands of her twin.
Meanwhile, Alice takes over Bennie's life, impersonating her at work and even seducing her boyfriend in order to escape the deadly mess she has made of her own life. But Alice underestimates Bennie and the evil she has unleashed in her twin's psyche. Soon Bennie, in her determination to stay alive long enough to exact revenge, must face the twisted truth that she is more like Alice than she could have ever imagined . . . and by the novel's shocking conclusion, Bennie finds herself engaged in a war she cannot win—with herself.
With its blistering speed, vivid characters, and perplexing moral questions, Think Twice is a riveting emotional thriller that will keep readers breathless until the very last page.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312380762 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2011 |
| Series: | Rosato & Associates Series , #11 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 162,364 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaDate of Birth:
July 1, 1955Place of Birth:
Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaEducation:
B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1976; J.D., University of Pennsylvania Law School, 1981Website:
http://www.scottoline.comRead an Excerpt
Chapter One
Bennie Rosato didn’t have anything in common with her identical twin, except their DNA. They shared the same blue eyes, strong cheekbones, and full mouth, but whenever Bennie looked at Alice Connelly, all she could see were their differences. Tonight, Bennie had on a khaki suit, white shirt, and brown pumps, her lawyer uniform. Alice had on tight shorts with a low-cut black top, flaunting cleavage that Bennie didn’t even know they had. She made a mental note to look down her shirt, after she got home.
Alice was making dinner and she opened the oven door, releasing the aroma of roasting chicken. “Finally, it’s ready.”
“Smells great.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Not at all.” Bennie changed the subject. “I like your new house, it’s great.”
“Yeah, right.” Alice turned, carving fork in hand. “Why are you being so condescending?”
“I’m not.”
“You are, too. It’ll look better when I move all my stuff in, and the rent is low, since the estate can’t sell it. That’s the only way I could afford it. I don’t have your money.”
Bennie let it go. “It’s good that it came furnished.”
“This crap? It’s dead people furniture.” Alice pushed back a smooth strand of hair, yet another difference between them. She blew-dry her hair straight, and her eyeliner was perfect. Bennie let her hair curl naturally and thought ChapStick was makeup.
She sipped her wine, feeling warm. There was no air-conditioning, and the kitchen was small and spare except for knobby wooden chairs and a dark wood table. A greenish glass fixture gave little light, and cracks zigzagged down the plaster like summer lightning. Still the cottage had a rustic charm, especially set in the rolling countryside of southeastern Pennsylvania, an hour or so outside of Philadelphia.
Alice plopped the chicken on the table, then sat down. “Don’t panic, it’s organic.”
“You’re eating healthy now, huh?”
“What do you mean? I always did. So, are you dating anybody?” Alice asked.
“No.”
“How long’s it been since you got laid?”
“Nice talk.” Bennie bit into a potato, which tasted good. “If I remembered sex, I’d miss it.”
“Whatever happened to that lawyer you lived with? What was his name again?”
“Grady Wells.” Bennie felt a pang. She’d get over Grady, any decade now.
“So what happened?”
“Didn’t work out.” Bennie ate quickly. It had taken forever to get here from Philly, in rush-hour traffic. She wouldn’t get home until midnight, which wasn’t the way she wanted to end an exhausting week.
“Who’d you see after Grady?”
“Nobody serious.”
“So he’s the one that got away?”
Bennie kept her head down, hiding her expression. She couldn’t understand how Alice always intuited so much about her. They’d never lived together, even as babies, though Alice claimed to have memories from the womb. Bennie couldn’t even remember where she put her car keys.
“So, what’s new in your life? Don’t give me the official version. I read the website.”
“Nothing but work. How about you?”
“I’m seeing a few nice guys, and I’m working out. I even joined a gym.” Alice made a muscle of her slim arm. “See?”
“Good.” Bennie had been an elite rower in her time, but she’d been too busy lately to exercise. “By the way, I hear great things about the job you’re doing at PLG. Karen thinks you’re terrific.”
“Are you keeping tabs on me, now?”
“Of course not. I ran into her, at a benefit.”
Alice arched an eyebrow. “Does she have to report to you just because you got me the job?”
“No, but if I see her, we talk. She knows me, like she knows most of the bar association. She has to, we all support the Public Law Group.” Bennie felt a headache coming on. She’d lost a motion in court this morning, and it was turning out to be the high point of her day.
“So what did she say, exactly? She loves to gossip.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Bennie sipped her wine, but it didn’t help. “All she said was that they like you. They have you doing office administration, payroll, and personnel, in addition to the paralegal work.”
“Not anymore. I quit.”
“What?” Bennie said, blind-sided. “You quit PLG? When?”
“The other day. It wasn’t for me, and the money sucked.”
“But you have to start somewhere.” Bennie couldn’t hide her dismay. She’d stuck her neck out for Alice and now her friends at PLG would be left in the lurch. “They would have promoted you, in time.”
“When, ten years?” Alice rolled her eyes. “The work was boring, and the people were so freaking annoying. I’d rather work with you, at Rosato & Associates.”
Bennie’s mouth went dry. She couldn’t imagine Alice at her firm. “I don’t need a paralegal.”
“I can answer phones.”
“I already have a receptionist.”
“So fire her ass.”
Bennie felt cranky. Maybe it was the headache, which was a doozy. “I like her. I would never do that to her.”
“Not even for me? We’re the only family we have.”
“No.” Bennie tried to keep a civil tongue. Being her sister’s keeper was getting old. “I can’t fire her. I won’t.”
“Okay, fine, then think outside the box. You need somebody to run the office, don’t you?”
“I run the office.”
Alice snorted. “If you ask me, you could use a hand with personnel. Those girls who work for you need a life lesson, especially the little one, Mary DiNunzio. Time for girlfriend to grow up.”
“That’s not true.” Bennie wished she hadn’t come. Her stomach felt queasy. Her appetite had vanished. She set down her fork. “DiNunzio’s a good lawyer. She should make partner next month.”
“Whatever, then I’ll be your assistant. I’ll take ninety grand, to start.”
“Listen, I can’t always be the solution to your problems.” Bennie’s head thundered. “I got you a job, and you quit it. If you want another job, go out and find one.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Alice smiled sourly. “The economy’s in the toilet, if you haven’t noticed.”
“You should have thought of that before, and you’ll find something, if you try. You went to college, and you have lots of . . . abilities and, oh, my head. . . .” Suddenly the kitchen whirled like spin art, and Bennie collapsed onto the table. Her face landed on the edge of her dirty plate, and her hand upset her water glass.
“Aww, got a headache?” Alice chuckled. “Too bad.”
Bennie didn’t know what was happening. She felt impossibly drunk. Her eyes wouldn’t stay open.
“You’re such a fool. You think I’d really want to work for you?”
Bennie tried to lift her head up, but couldn’t. All her strength had left her body. Sound and colors swirled together.
“Give it up. It’s over.”
Bennie watched, helpless, as darkness descended.
Excerpted from Think Twice by .
Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Scottoline.
Published in March 2010 by Roaring Brook Press.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
Reading Group Guide
An Original Essay by the Author
On its surface, Think Twice is the story of an evil twin who takes over the life of a good twin, and the question is whether the good or evil twin will survive.
But that's only the surface.
And appearances can be deceiving.
Those of you who are in book clubs like to dig deeper, and I appreciate your reading me, so I'll take this opportunity to break the wall between us and tell you frankly what inspired this novel, because to me, the surface is only part of what's going on in Think Twice.
But first, some background.
Where did I get the idea for Think Twice?
Believe it or not, I got the original inspiration from my own life—a decade or so ago, when I learned I had a half sister. I didn't learn of her existence until I was an adult, and she was a daughter of my father's, who was put up for adoption at birth. Happily, she had a wonderful adoptive experience, but after the passing of her adoptive father, she came to find her birth father, a difficult journey for her, and one which I honor, so much. But it was difficult for me, too, because when she surfaced, my experience was profoundly odd. I thought I was the only daughter, but I wasn't. I thought I was the oldest daughter, but I wasn't. It reconfigured my family, and confused and bewildered me, for a time.
I felt found, when I didn't know I'd been lost.
And so, a lifelong experiment in nature verses nurture began, in my mind.
But let's be clear. My half sister is a wonderful person, and not the evil twin herein. On the contrary, she's really the good twin. She looks uncannily like me, down to the blue eyes we both got from our father, and I've come to know and love her. But I knew I'd have to write about my feelings, in a way.
You can't have this job and ignore an event like that, or you forfeit your laptop.
Though Think Twice stands alone, it is, in fact, the third of three novels that I began after I met my half sister. The first was Mistaken Identity and the second Dead Ringer, which together introduce Alice and her increasingly homicidal actions. And, yes, I always use my real emotions to inform my novels. All fiction writers aspire to write the truth, as paradoxical as that may sound. As Francis Ford Coppola says, "Nothing in my movies happened, but everything is true." And the psychological journey that Bennie Rosato takes over the arc of these three novels was informed by my own feelings and gives Think Twice its emotional truth and power.
Especially because I believe that characterization is the most important part of any novel, what better way to delve deeply into character than through the trope of a good and evil twin? To me, what's really happening in Think Twice is that after Alice does all those terrible things to Bennie, Bennie finds that evil that lurks inside her own heart. And the real question in the novel is not will Bennie survive her twin, but will Bennie survive herself? Can she overcome the darker impulses for revenge and even murder that are stirred up, or maybe instigated, by Alice and her misconduct? Can Bennie get herself back, after she strays so far across the line between good and evil?
The English majors among you—and I know you are there, God bless you—will know that any good-and-evil-twin story inherits a long, rich literary tradition, which even has roots in modern psychology. To be specific, I was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and his story "William Wilson" when I first found out about my half sister and began to write about Bennie and Alice. If you haven't read Poe's stories, you should, and the one that haunted me was "William Wilson," and you'll see how it feeds into Think Twice.
Read on, as Poe would say.
"William Wilson" is the story of a schoolboy, and at the very outset, his identity is uncertain. In fact, Poe starts the story, "Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation."
Think "Call me Ishmael," but more intriguing.
Poe reportedly had an obsession with the color white, but we won't go into the parallels between him and Melville here. Suffice it to say that what happens in "William Wilson" is as epic a battle as with any white whale, but in Poe's story, the nemesis is the hero himself.
In the story, William Wilson meets a classmate who looks exactly like him. The other boy has the same name and even the same birthday. (Actually, William specifies that their shared birthday is "the nineteenth of January," which is Poe's own birthday.) He's the same height, too. They even enter the school on the same day, "by mere accident." The only difference between them is that the other boy has some defect in his throat that prevents him from raising his voice "above a very low whisper." Bottom line, the other boy is the double, or twin, of William Wilson.
The boys start out as uneasy friends, then the double does everything to make himself more like William Wilson, except that he can't copy his voice completely. William says, "His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own."
And interestingly, instead of the main character being the good one and the double being the bad one, in "William Wilson," the narrator is the bad one, and the double is the good one. It's so much more interesting, and bolder. Imagine Goofus and Gallant, with Goofus as the storyteller. Isn't he more fun to listen to than the goody-goody Gallant? Patricia Highsmith, the author of the Ripley series, and Jeff Lindsay, in the Dexter series, would make the same wise choice, though the first writer to do so may have been John Milton. In Paradise Lost, wasn't Satan more interesting than you-know-who?
But to stay on point, in William Wilson, the title character is witty, naughty, and an effete bully. He drinks too much, uses profanity, and cheats at cards. His double is nicer, kinder, and more considerate in every respect. In time, William Wilson comes to dislike, then hate his double. He leaves school to get away from him, then time passes and he goes to Eton, where one day, he invites "a small part of the most dissolute students" to his room for "a secret carousal." Bam! In walks his double, to spoil the fun. William Wilson says, "I grew perfectly sober in an instant."
The double is the buzzkill of the century.
William flees to Paris, his thoughts haunted by his doppelganger. He says, "again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions ‘Who is he? whence came he? and what are his objects?' But no answer was there found." At war with itself, William's psyche begins to disintegrate. He generates into chronic gambling, drinking, and further debauchery until we see him at another card game, with an aristocratic "dupe" he plies with liquor, to cheat him more easily. Suddenly, the double reappears and blows William's cover, exposing his hidden cards when he says: "Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper."
Busted.
William hurries to Rome, decompensating further, and during a ball at Carnival, his lecherous eye falls upon the beautiful wife of a duke. Out of the blue, the double appears, this time masked and caped, to thwart our hero's misdeed. The two fall into a swordfight, and. . . .
Well, I can't give away the surprise ending. But you can read excerpts from the story following this essay.
So why do I think this story is so great, and how does it speak to me and inform Think Twice? I think it's in the pull of its terrific premise, the doubling between William Wilson and his look-alike. While it's unclear whether William and his double are two halves of the same whole, or two separate people, the dramatic effect is the same. His fragmented or broken identity terrifies us at a profound level, and when it's the protagonist who's having an identity crisis, we're placed squarely in his very shaky shoes. So it's impossible to read "William Wilson" and not identify with William, feeling his anguish and his evil, both at once.
And the threat is so much greater when it comes from within, as in this story of psychological horror, than from without, as in a conventional ghost story. Poe knew that no monster is half as scary as the evil within us, and it's tempting to wonder if he "wrote what he knew," considering his own personal unhappiness and the fact that he assigned William Wilson his own birthday. Read that way, the story is poignant indeed.
Plus, Poe may not have invented the evil twin, but he certainly anticipated it, as well as exploiting the spookiness that comes from the fragmenting or doubling of the self, and the splintering of identity. Sigmund Freud would later explain its psychology in his seminal essays The Uncanny, written in 1919, but there's no doubt that the concept gives "William Wilson" its dramatic impact.
And the hold that doubling has on our collective psyche is underlined by its more recent examples in popular culture, from benign sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show to the comic book conflict of Superman and his evil flip side, Venom. Think, too, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the man looks like your husband but he's not your husband. Or vice versa, in The Stepford Wives, when the terrified wife stumbles upon her own replica.
Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels trade on the doubling concept, when our hero flashes back on a self he doesn't know, remember, or even recognize. Bourne's confusion about his own identity, and whether he is fundamentally good or evil echoes "William Wilson." And there's even a hint of identity duality, or a split self, in Stephen King's classic, The Shining, in which a frustrated writer takes a job as a hotel caretaker, loses his mind, and tries to kill his family. Not only is the caretaker a double of a previous caretaker, who had followed the same deranged path, but we see how easily good dad crosses the median to become evil dad, when a hotel and a blank page drive him crazy.
The blank page, I know well.
And the interesting thing is that, as an author, I've learned that the page is never really blank. The blank page is full of an author's life, experience, and even surprise sisters. It's all there, even before I sit down to write.
After you've read Think Twice, do take a second to see if you can find the similarities between my personal story, "William Wilson," and the novel. They're there.
Lurking.
And thanks again, for taking the time to read me.
I am honored, and very grateful.
Ideas for Bookclubs
I am a huge fan of book clubs because it means people are reading and discussing books. Mix that with wine and carbs, and you can't keep me away. I'm deeply grateful to all who read me, and especially honored when my book is chosen by a book club. I wanted an opportunity to say thank you to those who read me, which gave me the idea of a contest. Every year I hold a book club contest and the winning book club gets a visit from me and a night of fabulous food and good wine. To enter is easy: all you have to do is take a picture of your entire book club with each member holding a copy of my newest hardcover and send it to me by mail or e-mail. No book club is too small or too big. Don't belong to a book club? Start one. Just grab a loved one, a neighbor or friend, and send in your picture of you each holding my newest book. I look forward to coming to your town and wining and dining your group. For more details, just go to www.scottoline.com.
Tour time is my favorite time of year because I get to break out my fancy clothes and meet with interesting and fun readers around the country. The rest of the year I am a homebody, writing every day, but thrilled to be able to connect with readers through e-mail. I read all my e-mail, and answer as much as I can. So, drop me a line about books, families, pets, love, or whatever is on your mind at lisa@scottoline.com. For my latest book and tour information, special promotions, and updates you can sign up at www.scottoline.com for my newsletter.
Reading Group Questions
1. On the first page, we are told that Bennie and Alice, despite identical DNA, are polar opposites—but are they? Aside from appearance, in what ways are these women "twins"? What traits do they share?
2. Alice was given up for adoption and Bennie was raised by their mother. Who do you think had a better life? Why? What impact do you think this had on the person Alice has become? Do you think Alice uses this as justification for her horrible acts? Does Bennie owe Alice anything? Why or why not?
3. Think Twice asks the question: Is evil born or bred? How does the book explore the question, and how would you answer that question? Do you think there can be evil in a good person, and good in an evil person? Explain. When pushed to the limit, do you think we are all capable of evil? Talk about what might make you do something you would otherwise never do.
4. Both Alice and Bennie have a chance to kill one another, yet neither goes through with it. Why do you think that is?
5. What is the significance of Alice's decision to bury Bennie alive? Is it cruel torture, a flash of compassion, or simply an error in judgment? In what ways have they both "buried" each other over the years? Is this act metaphoric of something else?
6. If Valentina had not intervened, do you think Bennie would have shot and killed Alice? Would she have been justified? Would you have forgiven her? Is that the same question? In what way would killing Alice have led to Bennie's own destruction?
7. Why is it unsettling to imagine one has a doppelganger, a double, a second self walking the earth? If you found out that you had a twin you had never met, would you feel excited to embrace your long lost sibling, or would you feel threatened by this other you? What impact do you think it would have on your life and close relationships?
8. Mary DiNunzio has worked closely with Bennie for years, yet she was easily fooled by Alice. Why? Why was Mary so inclined to believe Alice's impersonation? Was she just distracted by her recent troubles with Anthony, or was she blinded by Bennie's new found admiration for her?
9. Speaking of her relationship trouble, what did you think about Mary's decision about the house? Did you agree or disagree? Why? Is Anthony old fashioned to want to be the main breadwinner in their relationship, or is that urge to provide in a man's nature? How are disparate salaries playing a role in today's relationships?
10. Is Valentina a real witch or a charlatan? Does she have superpowers or just a good gut instinct? Do you trust your instincts? Have you ever had an experience that led you to believe you might have a sixth sense?
Interviews
An Original Essay by the Author
On its surface, Think Twice is the story of an evil twin who takes over the life of a good twin, and the question is whether the good or evil twin will survive.
But that's only the surface.
And appearances can be deceiving.
Those of you who are in book clubs like to dig deeper, and I appreciate your reading me, so I'll take this opportunity to break the wall between us and tell you frankly what inspired this novel, because to me, the surface is only part of what's going on in Think Twice.
But first, some background.
Where did I get the idea for Think Twice?
Believe it or not, I got the original inspiration from my own life--a decade or so ago, when I learned I had a half sister. I didn't learn of her existence until I was an adult, and she was a daughter of my father's, who was put up for adoption at birth. Happily, she had a wonderful adoptive experience, but after the passing of her adoptive father, she came to find her birth father, a difficult journey for her, and one which I honor, so much. But it was difficult for me, too, because when she surfaced, my experience was profoundly odd. I thought I was the only daughter, but I wasn't. I thought I was the oldest daughter, but I wasn't. It reconfigured my family, and confused and bewildered me, for a time.
I felt found, when I didn't know I'd been lost.
And so, a lifelong experiment in nature verses nurture began, in my mind.
But let's be clear. My half sister is a wonderful person, and not the evil twin herein. On the contrary, she's really the good twin. She looks uncannily like me, down to the blue eyes we both got from our father, and I've come to know and love her. But I knew I'd have to write about my feelings, in a way.
You can't have this job and ignore an event like that, or you forfeit your laptop.
Though Think Twice stands alone, it is, in fact, the third of three novels that I began after I met my half sister. The first was Mistaken Identity and the second Dead Ringer, which together introduce Alice and her increasingly homicidal actions. And, yes, I always use my real emotions to inform my novels. All fiction writers aspire to write the truth, as paradoxical as that may sound. As Francis Ford Coppola says, "Nothing in my movies happened, but everything is true." And the psychological journey that Bennie Rosato takes over the arc of these three novels was informed by my own feelings and gives Think Twice its emotional truth and power.
Especially because I believe that characterization is the most important part of any novel, what better way to delve deeply into character than through the trope of a good and evil twin? To me, what's really happening in Think Twice is that after Alice does all those terrible things to Bennie, Bennie finds that evil that lurks inside her own heart. And the real question in the novel is not will Bennie survive her twin, but will Bennie survive herself? Can she overcome the darker impulses for revenge and even murder that are stirred up, or maybe instigated, by Alice and her misconduct? Can Bennie get herself back, after she strays so far across the line between good and evil?
The English majors among you--and I know you are there, God bless you--will know that any good-and-evil-twin story inherits a long, rich literary tradition, which even has roots in modern psychology. To be specific, I was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and his story "William Wilson" when I first found out about my half sister and began to write about Bennie and Alice. If you haven't read Poe's stories, you should, and the one that haunted me was "William Wilson," and you'll see how it feeds into Think Twice.
Read on, as Poe would say.
"William Wilson" is the story of a schoolboy, and at the very outset, his identity is uncertain. In fact, Poe starts the story, "Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation."
Think "Call me Ishmael," but more intriguing.
Poe reportedly had an obsession with the color white, but we won't go into the parallels between him and Melville here. Suffice it to say that what happens in "William Wilson" is as epic a battle as with any white whale, but in Poe's story, the nemesis is the hero himself.
In the story, William Wilson meets a classmate who looks exactly like him. The other boy has the same name and even the same birthday. (Actually, William specifies that their shared birthday is "the nineteenth of January," which is Poe's own birthday.) He's the same height, too. They even enter the school on the same day, "by mere accident." The only difference between them is that the other boy has some defect in his throat that prevents him from raising his voice "above a very low whisper." Bottom line, the other boy is the double, or twin, of William Wilson.
The boys start out as uneasy friends, then the double does everything to make himself more like William Wilson, except that he can't copy his voice completely. William says, "His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own."
And interestingly, instead of the main character being the good one and the double being the bad one, in "William Wilson," the narrator is the bad one, and the double is the good one. It's so much more interesting, and bolder. Imagine Goofus and Gallant, with Goofus as the storyteller. Isn't he more fun to listen to than the goody-goody Gallant? Patricia Highsmith, the author of the Ripley series, and Jeff Lindsay, in the Dexter series, would make the same wise choice, though the first writer to do so may have been John Milton. In Paradise Lost, wasn't Satan more interesting than you-know-who?
But to stay on point, in William Wilson, the title character is witty, naughty, and an effete bully. He drinks too much, uses profanity, and cheats at cards. His double is nicer, kinder, and more considerate in every respect. In time, William Wilson comes to dislike, then hate his double. He leaves school to get away from him, then time passes and he goes to Eton, where one day, he invites "a small part of the most dissolute students" to his room for "a secret carousal." Bam! In walks his double, to spoil the fun. William Wilson says, "I grew perfectly sober in an instant."
The double is the buzzkill of the century.
William flees to Paris, his thoughts haunted by his doppelganger. He says, "again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions 'Who is he? whence came he? and what are his objects?' But no answer was there found." At war with itself, William's psyche begins to disintegrate. He generates into chronic gambling, drinking, and further debauchery until we see him at another card game, with an aristocratic "dupe" he plies with liquor, to cheat him more easily. Suddenly, the double reappears and blows William's cover, exposing his hidden cards when he says: "Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper."
Busted.
William hurries to Rome, decompensating further, and during a ball at Carnival, his lecherous eye falls upon the beautiful wife of a duke. Out of the blue, the double appears, this time masked and caped, to thwart our hero's misdeed. The two fall into a swordfight, and. . . .
Well, I can't give away the surprise ending. But you can read excerpts from the story following this essay.
So why do I think this story is so great, and how does it speak to me and inform Think Twice? I think it's in the pull of its terrific premise, the doubling between William Wilson and his look-alike. While it's unclear whether William and his double are two halves of the same whole, or two separate people, the dramatic effect is the same. His fragmented or broken identity terrifies us at a profound level, and when it's the protagonist who's having an identity crisis, we're placed squarely in his very shaky shoes. So it's impossible to read "William Wilson" and not identify with William, feeling his anguish and his evil, both at once.
And the threat is so much greater when it comes from within, as in this story of psychological horror, than from without, as in a conventional ghost story. Poe knew that no monster is half as scary as the evil within us, and it's tempting to wonder if he "wrote what he knew," considering his own personal unhappiness and the fact that he assigned William Wilson his own birthday. Read that way, the story is poignant indeed.
Plus, Poe may not have invented the evil twin, but he certainly anticipated it, as well as exploiting the spookiness that comes from the fragmenting or doubling of the self, and the splintering of identity. Sigmund Freud would later explain its psychology in his seminal essays The Uncanny, written in 1919, but there's no doubt that the concept gives "William Wilson" its dramatic impact.
And the hold that doubling has on our collective psyche is underlined by its more recent examples in popular culture, from benign sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show to the comic book conflict of Superman and his evil flip side, Venom. Think, too, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the man looks like your husband but he's not your husband. Or vice versa, in The Stepford Wives, when the terrified wife stumbles upon her own replica.
Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels trade on the doubling concept, when our hero flashes back on a self he doesn't know, remember, or even recognize. Bourne's confusion about his own identity, and whether he is fundamentally good or evil echoes "William Wilson." And there's even a hint of identity duality, or a split self, in Stephen King's classic, The Shining, in which a frustrated writer takes a job as a hotel caretaker, loses his mind, and tries to kill his family. Not only is the caretaker a double of a previous caretaker, who had followed the same deranged path, but we see how easily good dad crosses the median to become evil dad, when a hotel and a blank page drive him crazy.
The blank page, I know well.
And the interesting thing is that, as an author, I've learned that the page is never really blank. The blank page is full of an author's life, experience, and even surprise sisters. It's all there, even before I sit down to write.
After you've read Think Twice, do take a second to see if you can find the similarities between my personal story, "William Wilson," and the novel. They're there.
Lurking.
And thanks again, for taking the time to read me.
I am honored, and very grateful.
Ideas for Bookclubs
I am a huge fan of book clubs because it means people are reading and discussing books. Mix that with wine and carbs, and you can't keep me away. I'm deeply grateful to all who read me, and especially honored when my book is chosen by a book club. I wanted an opportunity to say thank you to those who read me, which gave me the idea of a contest. Every year I hold a book club contest and the winning book club gets a visit from me and a night of fabulous food and good wine. To enter is easy: all you have to do is take a picture of your entire book club with each member holding a copy of my newest hardcover and send it to me by mail or e-mail. No book club is too small or too big. Don't belong to a book club? Start one. Just grab a loved one, a neighbor or friend, and send in your picture of you each holding my newest book. I look forward to coming to your town and wining and dining your group. For more details, just go to www.scottoline.com.
Tour time is my favorite time of year because I get to break out my fancy clothes and meet with interesting and fun readers around the country. The rest of the year I am a homebody, writing every day, but thrilled to be able to connect with readers through e-mail. I read all my e-mail, and answer as much as I can. So, drop me a line about books, families, pets, love, or whatever is on your mind at lisa@scottoline.com. For my latest book and tour information, special promotions, and updates you can sign up at www.scottoline.com for my newsletter.
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