The Other – Thomas Tryon, 1971 ★★★

Tranquility Meets Terror 

Back in 1971, The Other was destination fiction for scare aficionados, a macabre tale with a surprise or two to spring on the reader. A popular and critical success, it twisted many young minds.

Since then, the horror genre has changed a lot, thanks to a guy named King, sexy vampires, and hordes of undead. The Other stands apart with its fine-grain prose and prim avoidance of the supernatural. Reading it, you can’t help but feel time’s passage.

After an introduction from an unidentified narrator in apparent seclusion, we journey back to 1935 and a barn in the quiet Connecticut town of Pequot Landing, where 13-year-old Niles Perry hides out in the apple cellar with his only companion, twin brother Holland.

Despite their bond, we are clued in early all is not right with the pair:

Certainly Niles was pleased to be with him, pleased with his company, pleased they were not only brothers but friends as well. Only, truthfully, they weren’t – not really. Not that Niles didn’t desire it – they just weren’t close. Niles found Holland strange, unpliant, distant. Often secretive, brooding. Of a dark nature. Holland was his own person, a loner, and who was there could do anything about that?

Any novel offering big surprises risks coming off rote once these are known. But knowing the surprises here is not such a problem. The book holds its own well even after its traps are sprung.

One of the book’s biggest surprises is the way it sneaks up on you. Told in a deceptively slow and gentle style, fed through the almost cloyingly nostalgic prism of a sleepy childhood summer from long ago, you might think you are in for something more wistful and gentle than what unfolds. Slow, yes, but diabolic all the same:

Childhood was but a few brief summers; winter a whole, cold, lifetime long.

Thomas Tryon. All told, he produced ten works of published fiction in his second career as a writer. He died in 1991. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Other-York-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590175832. 

Tryon, himself the product of a 1930s Connecticut childhood, showcases a lived-in sensitivity for the time and place, not to mention the secret world inhabited by children which becomes the center of the universe for Niles and reader. Taken that way, The Other works both as misdirection ploy and slightly satiric roman à clef regarding American suburban life around the time of the Great Depression.

I enjoy good horror fiction from the 1970s and have a strong fondness for Tryon novels, which should make The Other a killer read for me. It was by far his most successful book, critically and commercially, and made into a movie the following year which enjoys a cult following itself, if Amazon and IMDb reviews indicate anything. But my appreciation for The Other is a matter more of respect than love.

It’s a clever, well-told story; a convincing showcase for Tryon’s ability as a writer. His descriptions read at times like tone poems, so well calibrated are they in mood and detail to communicate a sense of something that might be dubbed “pastoral dread”:

Overhead the summer sky was bright blue, the perfect, translucent blue of a Dutch china plate, glazed with an awful clarity, stunning to the eye, but brittle like the shell of an egg; if he stared too long at it, it would crack, shatter to bits, a deadly blue hail falling about him.

Passages like this must have been a revelation to people who knew Tryon as a featured actor in movies and television. Tryon hated acting; The Other’s success gave him the freedom to leave it for good.

Good prose aside, I don’t love The Other. As a story, it feels a bit thin, with a minimal amount of actual incident. The supporting characters are cardboard creations, with only one, a Russian grandmother, registering in any significant way. One of the early shocks, involving a hayrick accident, takes forever to happen and is telegraphed too overtly.

As a Tryon reader, I prefer his immediate follow-up, Harvest Home, which despite some flaws employs a more active plot and a sly wit largely missing here; and his later return to 1930s Connecticut, The Night Of The Moonbow, whose cast of active boys present more realistic and involving company. But I get why The Other was the bigger hit. From cover to cover, it works its singular magic well and takes the reader on quite a ride.

An old Prince Albert can hidden in Niles' bedroom is the container of some major secrets in The Other. It is one of many 1930s cultural artifacts to make an appearance. Image from https://www.4noggins.com/prince-albert-pipe-tobacco-2.aspx.

There are actually at least two very dark surprises in store for the reader, the second being nearly as memorable and even more out-of-sync with the novel’s overall genteel tone. They are certainly not for everyone, but as a product of the time (1971, the year that brought us movies like A Clockwork Orange and Carnal Knowledge) they not only work in a transgressive way but add a layer of perversity to the reading experience that can amuse, if in a very dark way. Think of Poe, and you may enjoy them, too.

The horror aspect is important to The Other’s lasting appeal, and a bit of an outlier that way in Tryon’s oeuvre. Despite its success, Tryon only really returned to the genre in Harvest Home. Other books, like Night Of The Moonbow and Crowned Heads, offer elements of horror, but are more in the nature of psychological stories with often disturbing outcomes. That, and not horror, proved Tryon’s element.

With The Other, we have a spooky house, large and rambling and more than a bit disheveled with Father dead and Mother a drunken invalid. Even before the story begins, it has earned a reputation among residents of Pequot Landing for being cursed. “It was if the house itself were breathing, exerting some effort of its own, struggling to maintain a curious lifelike equilibrium, as a spoon balances on the rim of a glass,” Tryon writes of it. “Suspense had magnetized the air.”

Built in the 18th century, the Joseph Webb and Isaac Stevens houses form part of bucolic Main Street in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford. One indicator Wethersfield was the basis for Tryon's Pequot Landing comes early in The Other, when we are told the town is known for its onions. Wethersfield was long known as "Oniontown" for the same reason. Another reason: Tryon himself grew up there. Four of his eight novels are set in "Pequot Landing." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wethersfield,_Connecticut.

By way of contrast, Niles is presented as naively innocent, helpful in his inclinations, secure in the company of Holland and his grandmother Ada. While a teenager, any thoughts of a sexual nature seem far away. He’d rather swim in a nearby pond and commune with nature. As summer returns, he enjoys his freedom and his excitement over his older sister’s pregnancy. His only secrets involve his brother, the novel’s wild-card who disappears from our story for long periods, apparently riding the trolley lines to Pequot Landing’s outskirts, called “Babylon.”

The only other hints of trouble come with occasional peeks into Niles’ active imagination, fed by pulp fiction and radio shows:

He squinted, looked hard, saw: primordial ooze, spawning strange beings down below, a race of quasi-lunged, half-legged creatures dragging themselves along the bottom; a world sunless, gloomy, nocturnal, where sunken logs lay, sodden and heavy, poor dead drowned things, and with them, hidden in the murk, savage bloated creatures, mouths wide as shovels, thick lips nuzzling threads of water-whitened ganglia, picking clean of flesh skeletons through whose empty eye-sockets coldly glowing eels wound like night trains, while overhead, through the ruined room, pterodactyls soared the vacant sky.

Pulp magazines provide escape fodder for Niles' boundless imagination. Above is the cover from the June 1935 issue of Doc Savage Magazine, a favorite of his. Image from https://pulpcovers.com/tag/docsavage/.

The narrator reappears with warnings not to take too fondly to Niles: “Niles is not entirely the paragon he appears, nor Holland quite the knave.” But you can’t help but focus your negative thoughts on Holland, whose inclination for mischief seems cruel indeed. The more you read, the more annoyed you get with Niles for the way he not only tolerates but venerates his older twin.

I really do enjoy this aspect of the novel, especially reading it again. There are some implausibilities, but I have to remind myself that Tryon takes pains to present this story in second-hand form, so a certain wayward subjectivity has to be entered into the equation.

A visit to a travelling fair suggests elements of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way and plants a seed for a memorable final act:

Back in the dim light leaking through from the entrance, on the shiny black oilcloth that decked the rickety table, sat the glass laboratory jar, its tiny specimen still bobbing in the solution, the blank marble eyes dead, staring, the mouth pink and toothless, open in its silent scream.

There is also some spookiness involving the game Niles plays with his Russian grandmother. They share what might be called “second sight,” the ability to not only read one another’s thoughts but even tap into the consciousness of animals around the farm. This is as close to the supernatural as The Other ever gets, and as far as it needs to go.

Young Niles (Chris Udvarnoky) shares his gift for second sight with his grandmother Ada (Uta Hagen) in the 1972 film adaptation of The Other. Despite writing the screenplay, Tryon was dissatisfied with how it came off on screen. Image from http://www.movie-roulette.com/movie/the-other.

Most of the time, I felt Tryon in his element less around the story’s horror elements and more when taking in the pleasant surroundings and the members of the extended Perry clan. “Niles had heard that Aunt Valeria’s Chicago friends called her ‘Chickie’ and he could understand why: she never spoke, she cheeped, like young poultry.” A local shopkeeper, we are told, “was an enthusiastic lady; you could tell she meant practically every word she spoke.”

Tryon also invests his narrative with fondness for the period where it is set, with old radio shows and commercial slogans. Much attention is given to the recent kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby son, an element that becomes more central to the story as it develops. But most of the rest works well enough alone, in its scene-setting way.

Make no mistake, The Other is a true horror story, and a minor masterpiece of the genre in its deceptively gentle, ultimately cold-hearted way. Forgotten, perhaps, but worthy of rediscovery.