Synopsis:
A couple on an outdoor retreat meet their doppelgangers on a hiking trail and are soon tested on how well they truly know each other.
Review:
Well that was rather stressful. In her latest, the second instalment in The Outsiders Sequence, Neugebauer rolls the uncanny up tight like a sleeping bag, dehydrates dread into a concentrated horror jerky (stay with me), and packs them alongside ample supply of anxiety and dramatic irony. “The Other,” is, for the second time in a row, an A-star-star concept from Neugebauer, executed absolutely ruthlessly. An airless novella that raised my heartbeat so high that I considered the two hours I spent slumped in bed with it my exercise for the day- there is no reason why you shouldn’t be picking this one up if you’re looking for a quick, vicious hit of horror. This one is out from the eternally marvellous Shortwave June 9th, and I am already craving the third and final instalment.
We follow Elise and Logan who are hiking in Oklahoma. They are having a grand time but putting off an important discussion about their future, marriage, children- all of those big, heavy nouns- and must postpone that tough conversation even further when they meet another couple headed the opposite direction. The couple seem nice enough if not a little socially out of step- but uncannily similar to themselves. Allison and Elise wear the same orange hat, Bryce and Logan the same dark green beanie- and that’s not where the similarities end. But yeah no, they seem pleasant enough, night is coming, and the next nearest campsite is miles away, so the decision is made, reasonably, casually- they’ll share.
I loved “The Extra,” a whole bunch- it was a clean and clever idea, pulled off very well. “The Other,” is just as cutting a concept, but I found this time, with the cast pared down to just a couple, and their doppelgangers, there was a whole lot more depth. Neugebauer writes about anxiety within relationships so beautifully and relatably. About the horror of not just being burdened, but feeling you are the burden, about the fear that love hardens into just habit, about how separation, even if just looming, can be grief-like. It’s just Elise, Logan, the awful proximity of themselves, and a bunch of feelings. Neugebauer writes too about how scary and existential 30 is- once you’ve come of age, and are expected to make some very big, adult choices- commit to a life. Looking forward to that.
I suppose the fact Elise and Logan are so three-dimensional intensifies the horror of the doppelganger. They are scary. That loss of identity, the relationships, all those big feelings we know the couple are having, approximated. Tangentially there’s the horror of worrying your partner isn’t who they say they are. There is a fragile trust that we place in the identity of others. They could be a criminal, a cheater…an alien life force. And tangentially to that, perhaps more unique to Logan and Elise is the worry that your partner will not believe that you are who you say you are, that you will be abandoned and discarded… and then we realise that that’s not something all that unique to finding your doppelgangers in the woods at all. Neugebauer’s writing is full of real, familiar paranoia dialled up to the extreme, an intense read for sure.
I’ve always considered camping to be the most deranged of leisure activities, a voluntary surrender of walls and locks and comfort. If you throw doppelgangers into that mix then I am running for Texas. I digress- this is that one Spider-Man pointing meme meets “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It’s a single-sitting, no-messing nightmare that is proficient in eliciting almost every sub-category of horror- anxiety, unease, terror. This is lean and vicious and comes enthusiastically recommended (along with its predecessor) by yours truly- although under no circumstances is it to be read in a tent.
Leave a Reply