Doppelganger weaves horror with humor
Horror is a difficult genre to pull off, with a set of tropes so familiar and restrictive that it often feels the only way to win is not to play. The scariest stories to me have always been the most plausible-seeming, where the stakes are more nuanced and freighted than mere life and death.
With The Need (Simon & Schuster, $26) Helen Phillips (2015’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat) has managed a remarkable feat; she has fashioned an unsettling, core-jolting book from the materials of everyday life (or at least everyday motherhood). A examination of maternal panic and splintering identity, it takes as its protagonist Molly Nye, a 30-something mother of baby Ben and toddler Viv, who faces the existential terror of meeting her doppelganger, Moll, a sort of secret sharer who first appears to
her as a masked home invader.
From the novel’s first words, we are drawn into Molly’s paranoia; she is crouching in a closet with her children, certain that the noise she’s hearing in the other room is the product of her imagination: “She knew there was no intruder.”
Molly is a scientist, a paleobotanist, and her musician husband, David, is away, performing on another continent. She is, as all mothers in her situation must be, suffering from “apocalyptic exhaustion.” She’s frightened by and for her children, functioning under a pervasive sense of impending disaster. She’s self-aware enough to know this about herself, and to suspect her fragile state of mind is conducive to hallucinatory imaginings.
She works at a fossil quarry, as part of a team examining and cataloging plant fossils. Lately other artifacts have been turning up, objects apparently from some alternate reality like an Altoids tin, apparently from the 1980s, that’s shaped slightly different from the familiar, iconic ones. There’s a glass Coke bottle from the 1970s with a backward-tilting logo; a ’60s vintage plastic toy soldier with a monkey tail and, most intriguingly, what appears to be a small Bible from the early 20th-century where every pronoun referring to the Almighty is feminine.
Molly was at first charmed by these odd discoveries, which she couldn’t explain and entertained as a possible hoax. But their discovery brought interest from the press and the general public, who now flock to the previously obscure pit for tours, lectures and to gawk at the oddities in glass cases. It has been a mixed blessing, for even as its increased interest, generated revenue and improved the project’s chances for future funding, it has also drawn protesters — religious fundamentalists objecting to perceived heresy.
Then Moll arrives, apparently a refugee from the multi-verse the pit might be a portal to, bearing not only her remarkable physical identicalness but a deep knowledge of Molly’s secrets and domestic routines. She had children who were Ben and Viv’s doubles. She has a husband David. Yet there are disturbing variances in her story.
In some ways it’s handy having a double who is more than willing to help out with the kids, but Molly knows what Moll’s capable of, because she’s capable of it herself. She oscillates between empathy and the desire to obliterate her help-meet rival, who she understands is experiencing similar impulses.
There’s a lot of black comedy embedded in this precisely structured and, at times, remarkably tender book, which weaves in elements of science fiction, thriller and psychological realism. It’s like Jordan Peele’s recent film Us, not only in its employment of the doppelganger as a way to explore the duality of individuals but in the way it builds and maintains suspense.
While some have expressed doubts about the book’s ability to engage readers dissimilar to the very specific Molly, it rattled this childless male critic.
Just time for a word about Karen Russell’s latest collection, Orange World (Knopf, $25.95), which consists of eight vivid and fantastical stories (four of which I remembered reading in The New Yorker) about characters who find themselves matter-of-factly partying with the dead or dragging them along with them to school or making a deal to breastfeed the devil (who she thinks resembles a “mutant red raccoon”).
While Russell may be bestknown for her 2011 novel Swamplandia!, her real metier is in the shorter form as she’s able to conjure credible, full-blown universes to contain what otherwise might come across as arch and clever stories. But as it is, she’s the best at doing the odd and endearing thing that she does, which is inviting our compassion for her freaks and notions.
My favorite story here is one I hadn’t previously encountered, “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound,” a tour de force in which Russell not only nails Flaubert’s style but heartbreakingly explores the way our animals, even if they no longer love us, remain “indentured to love’s ghost”:
A dog’s love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one’s ability to hold that one’s interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion — from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.
That’s mad good. pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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