SOMEONE LIKE ME

Two sides to every story

MR Carey returns with a 21st Century take on Jekyll and Hyde.

The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde is one of those modern fables that keeps being reinvented; sometimes with a wonderfully lurid lack of subtlety, as in Hammer’s Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde, but often in less obvious forms, such as Stephen King’s The Dark Half, or even The Incredible Hulk. The appeal is obvious: we all like to think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, but we all fear we have the potential to be the villain.

The veneer of MR Carey’s new novel would seem to suggest we have yet another modern version of Jekyll and Hyde here. That’s certainly the way it’s being marketed. And that’s certainly the way things seem at the beginning. But Someone Like Me isn’t just Jekyll and Hyde with, say, a social media/VR twist. Partly because Carey mixes in other fantasy tropes to create a deeply weird and eerily enticing urban horror, but also partly because the central conceit doesn’t actually rely on us all having “a dark side”. It just happens that the main character is brought face to face with hers.

The book is full of twists and surprises, with major gamechangers occurring regularly, making it tricky to discuss the plot in detail. So here’s a spoiler-light primer. Liz Kendall is a longsuffering victim of domestic violence, who finally stands up to her abusive ex-husband Marc, burying a broken bottle in his face when he tries to strangle her. But Liz doesn’t feel like she’s in control when it happens; she feels like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings, and that someone else starts gaining more control. Especially when Marc starts stalking Liz, trying to frighten her out of taking him to court.

Meanwhile, a teenage girl called Fran who was, as a small child, kidnapped and held hostage by a man the press tagged the Shadowman, is still having nightmares and hallucinations. Very mundane hallucinations: small details, such as colours or the position of things, change. She deals with these problems partly by seeing a therapist and partly by interacting with her imaginary friend, a fox called Lady Jinx.

There’s a connection between the characters. The motel where Fran was held captive was the same place Liz and her husband first had sex. And when Fran starts an adorable teen romance with Liz’s son, she’s surprised to see two people occupying the same space whenever she looks at Liz…

As an urban horror, Someone Like Me works brilliantly. The violence is lobbed like incendiary bombs into a prosaic life of health insurance, legal aid and trying to make ends meet. The creeping terror of Liz’s loss of control is chillingly evoked. Liz’s “dark side” is deliciously Machiavellian. The book also benefits from vividlydrawn characters, who all have their own failings to face up to, usually with a healthy dose of self-deprecating wit.

Carey feels less sure-footed when it comes to the more fanciful fantasy elements. There are moments when he enters the dark fairytale arena beloved of Neil Gaiman, Graham Joyce and Diana Wynne Jones, but his less lyrical style means that the two tones don’t convincingly dovetail. It also means that you’re less willing to dismiss lapses in the plot rationale as dream logic. Especially what happened to Liz’s dark half to make her so dark – it feels like one of the Gwyneth Paltrows in Sliding Doors turning into a mad axe murderer. It’s not enough of a problem to claim the book suffers from a split personality, though; it’s more of an intriguing, mild personality disorder. Dave Golder

Someone Like Me has been optioned for TV by Hillbilly Films, the production company behind Holy Flying Circus.

A deeply weird and enticing horror