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Published Date : 1984
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Two brilliant short novels on the theme of a double life. Although
they are worlds apart in scene and character, both are full of a kind
of eerie menace that lies just beneath the outward events.
Lauren Slaughter’s
life began to change beyond recognition one evening at a dinner party
when she met the quite strange Mr. Van Arkady. “There are five
thousand people in the world,” he said, and he meant that literally.
The other millions, he asserted, don’t really matter. Lauren,a Fellow
at a respected institute and a student of the politics of the Persian
Gulf, found a second, sinister life for herself when she met Captain
Twilley and Madame Cybele and began to work for the Jasmine escort
service. Doctor Slaughter is full of social satire and the promise of
violence. It is a Rake’s Progress dazzlingly translated into a
late-twentieth-century London.
In Doctor
DeMarr Gerald DeMarr’s life suddenly changes one July day when his
missing twin brother George turns up on the doorstep of their
Massachusetts family home and demands to stay. Where has George been
all these years? Before Gerald can find the answer, he discovers
George dead of a drug overdose. Then, retracing his twin’s footsteps,
he gradually reveals for himself a horrifying - - and quite nearby --
life that George has led and has tried to escape from. And, without
willing it, Gerald is drawn into playing the role of his alter ego,
and he plays it out to the terrible and unexpected ending. |
