eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
Related collections and offers
Overview
From the blockbuster New York Times bestselling author of Look Again comes a novel that makes you question the nature of evil: is it born in us or is it bred?
Bennie Rosato looks exactly like her identical twin, Alice Connolly, but the darkness in Alice's soul makes them two very different women. Or at least that's what Bennie believes, until she finds herself buried alive at the hands of her twin.
Meanwhile, Alice takes over Bennie's life, impersonating her at work and even seducing her boyfriend in order to escape the deadly mess she has made of her own life. But Alice underestimates Bennie and the evil she has unleashed in her twin's psyche, as well as Bennie's determination to stay alive long enough to exact revenge.
Bennie must face the twisted truth that she is more like her sister Alice than she could have ever imagined, and by the novel's shocking conclusion, Bennie finds herself engaged in a war she cannot win—with herself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429961332 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2010 |
| Series: | Rosato & Associates Series , #11 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 52,508 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times bestselling author of over thirty novels including Look Again, Lady Killer, Think Twice, Save Me and Everywhere That Mary Went. She also writes a weekly column, “Chick Wit,” with her daughter Francesca Serritella, for The Philadelphia Inquirer. The columns have been collected in several volumes, including Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog and My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space. Scottoline has won an Edgar® Award and Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Fun Fearless Fiction” Award, and she served as the president of Mystery Writers of America. She teaches a course on justice and fiction at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She lives in the Philadelphia area.
Hometown:
Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaDate of Birth:
July 1, 1955Place of Birth:
Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaEducation:
B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1976; J.D., University of Pennsylvania Law School, 1981Website:
http://www.scottoline.comRead an Excerpt
Think Twice
By Lisa Scottoline
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2010 Lisa ScottolineAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6133-2
CHAPTER 1
Bennie Rosato didn't have anything in common with her identical twin, except their DNA. They shared the same blue eyes, strong cheekbones, and full mouth, but whenever Bennie looked at Alice Connelly, all she could see were their differences. Tonight, Bennie had on a khaki suit, white shirt, and brown pumps, her lawyer uniform. Alice had on tight shorts with a low-cut black top, flaunting cleavage that Bennie didn't even know they had. She made a mental note to look down her shirt, after she got home.
Alice was making dinner and she opened the oven door, releasing the aroma of roasting chicken. "Finally, it's ready."
"Smells great."
"You sound surprised."
"Not at all." Bennie changed the subject. "I like your new house, it's great."
"Yeah, right." Alice turned, carving fork in hand. "Why are you being so condescending?"
"I'm not."
"You are, too. It'll look better when I move all my stuff in, and the rent is low, since the estate can't sell it. That's the only way I could afford it. I don't have your money."
Bennie let it go. "It's good that it came furnished."
"This crap? It's dead people furniture." Alice pushed back a smooth strand of hair, yet another difference between them. She blew-dry her hair straight, and her eyeliner was perfect. Bennie let her hair curl naturally and thought ChapStick was makeup.
She sipped her wine, feeling warm. There was no air-conditioning, and the kitchen was small and spare except for knobby wooden chairs and a dark wood table. A greenish glass fixture gave little light, and cracks zigzagged down the plaster like summer lightning. Still the cottage had a rustic charm, especially set in the rolling countryside of southeastern Pennsylvania, an hour or so outside of Philadelphia.
Alice plopped the chicken on the table, then sat down. "Don't panic, it's organic."
"You're eating healthy now, huh?"
"What do you mean? I always did. So, are you dating anybody?" Alice asked.
"No."
"How long's it been since you got laid?"
"Nice talk." Bennie bit into a potato, which tasted good. "If I remembered sex, I'd miss it."
"Whatever happened to that lawyer you lived with? What was his name again?"
"Grady Wells." Bennie felt a pang. She'd get over Grady, any decade now.
"So what happened?"
"Didn't work out." Bennie ate quickly. It had taken forever to get here from Philly, in rush-hour traffic. She wouldn't get home until midnight, which wasn't the way she wanted to end an exhausting week.
"Who'd you see after Grady?"
"Nobody serious."
"So he's the one that got away?"
Bennie kept her head down, hiding her expression. She couldn't understand how Alice always intuited so much about her. They'd never lived together, even as babies, though Alice claimed to have memories from the womb. Bennie couldn't even remember where she put her car keys.
"So, what's new in your life? Don't give me the official version. I read the website."
"Nothing but work. How about you?"
"I'm seeing a few nice guys, and I'm working out. I even joined a gym." Alice made a muscle of her slim arm. "See?"
"Good." Bennie had been an elite rower in her time, but she'd been too busy lately to exercise. "By the way, I hear great things about the job you're doing at PLG. Karen thinks you're terrific."
"Are you keeping tabs on me, now?"
"Of course not. I ran into her, at a benefit."
Alice arched an eyebrow. "Does she have to report to you just because you got me the job?"
"No, but if I see her, we talk. She knows me, like she knows most of the bar association. She has to, we all support the Public Law Group." Bennie felt a headache coming on. She'd lost a motion in court this morning, and it was turning out to be the high point of her day.
"So what did she say, exactly? She loves to gossip."
"It wasn't like that." Bennie sipped her wine, but it didn't help. "All she said was that they like you. They have you doing office administration, payroll, and personnel, in addition to the paralegal work."
"Not anymore. I quit."
"What?" Bennie said, blind-sided. "You quit PLG? When?"
"The other day. It wasn't for me, and the money sucked."
"But you have to start somewhere." Bennie couldn't hide her dismay. She'd stuck her neck out for Alice and now her friends at PLG would be left in the lurch. "They would have promoted you, in time."
"When, ten years?" Alice rolled her eyes. "The work was boring, and the people were so freaking annoying. I'd rather work with you, at Rosato & Associates."
Bennie's mouth went dry. She couldn't imagine Alice at her firm. "I don't need a paralegal."
"I can answer phones."
"I already have a receptionist."
"So fire her ass."
Bennie felt cranky. Maybe it was the headache, which was a doozy. "I like her. I would never do that to her."
"Not even for me? We're the only family we have."
"No." Bennie tried to keep a civil tongue. Being her sister's keeper was getting old. "I can't fire her. I won't."
"Okay, fine, then think outside the box. You need somebody to run the office, don't you?"
"I run the office."
Alice snorted. "If you ask me, you could use a hand with personnel. Those girls who work for you need a life lesson, especially the little one, Mary DiNunzio. Time for girlfriend to grow up."
"That's not true." Bennie wished she hadn't come. Her stomach felt queasy. Her appetite had vanished. She set down her fork. "DiNunzio's a good lawyer. She should make partner next month."
"Whatever, then I'll be your assistant. I'll take ninety grand, to start."
"Listen, I can't always be the solution to your problems." Bennie's head thundered. "I got you a job, and you quit it. If you want another job, go out and find one."
"Thanks, Mom." Alice smiled sourly. "The economy's in the toilet, if you haven't noticed."
"You should have thought of that before, and you'll find something, if you try. You went to college, and you have lots of ... abilities and, oh, my head...." Suddenly the kitchen whirled like spin art, and Bennie collapsed onto the table. Her face landed on the edge of her dirty plate, and her hand upset her water glass.
"Aww, got a headache?" Alice chuckled. "Too bad."
Bennie didn't know what was happening. She felt impossibly drunk. Her eyes wouldn't stay open.
"You're such a fool. You think I'd really want to work for you?"
Bennie tried to lift her head up, but couldn't. All her strength had left her body. Sound and colors swirled together.
"Give it up. It's over."
Bennie watched, helpless, as darkness descended.
CHAPTER 2Bennie woke up, groggy. She opened her eyes but everything stayed pitch black. She didn't know where she was. She seemed to be lying down. Where was the kitchen? The house? Alice? She couldn't see anything. Was she asleep? She got up and slam!
"Ow!" she heard herself say, momentarily stunned. She slumped backwards, hitting the back of her head. On what? Where was she? Was she dreaming? Was she awake? One question chased the next in a crazy circle. It was so dark. If she was asleep, it was time to wake up.
She raised her hand and bam! Her fingers hit something hard, above her. She flashed on the dinner with Alice. That had happened, hadn't it? She hadn't dreamed it, had she? Her face had fallen onto the table, hitting her cheek.
Give it up. It's over.
Bennie tried to remember. Had she heard that? Had Alice said that? What the hell? Where was she? The only sound was her own breathing. She raised her arms, cautiously, and hit the thing on top of her. She felt along its surface with her fingertips. It was solid. Coarse. She pressed but it didn't move. She knocked it and heard a rap, like wood. It felt like a top.
A lid.
She didn't get it. She couldn't process it. Her arms were at an angle. The wood was less than a foot from her face. She flattened her arms against her sides. There was another surface under her fingertips, behind her. She spread her arms, running them along the surface behind her. More wood? She shifted her weight down, shimmying on her back. Her toes hit something. Her feet were bare, her shoes gone. She pointed her toes against whatever she had reached. It seemed like a bottom.
It's a box. Am I in a box?
She didn't understand. It couldn't be. She touched along her body from her neck to her knees. She had on her suit from work. Her skirt felt torn. Her knees hurt. There was wetness there. Blood? She told herself not to panic. The air felt close. She squinted against the darkness, but it was absolute.
She felt the lid. Her thoughts raced ahead of her fingers. The top was sealed. There was nothing inside the box. No air, food, water. No hole to breathe through. She forced herself to stay calm. She needed to understand what was going on. It wasn't a dream, it was real. She couldn't believe it and she could, both at once. Was she really in a box? Would Alice come get her out? Would anybody else?
A sense of dread crept over her. She hadn't told anybody at the office where she was going. It was Friday night, and the associates had scattered. DiNunzio had taken Judy Carrier home to her parents' for dinner. Anne Murphy was out of the country for summer vacation, as was Lou Jacobs, her firm's investigator. Bennie's best friend, Sam Freminet, was in Maui, and she wasn't close to anybody else. Nobody would realize that she was missing until Monday morning.
She exploded in panic, yelling and pounding the lid with both hands. It didn't budge. She kept pounding with all her might, breaking a sweat. The lid still didn't move. She felt the seams with shaking fingers. She couldn't tell how it was sealed. She didn't hear a nail or anything else give way.
She pushed and pounded, then started kicking, driving her bare toes into the lid. It didn't move but she kept going, powered by sheer terror, and in the next minute she heard herself screaming, even though the words shamed her.
"Please, Alice, help!"
CHAPTER 3Alice dried the Pyrex dish and placed it where she'd found it in the cabinet, then folded the dishtowel over the handle of the oven, the way it had been. She went to the table, straightened the stack of paid bills, and squared the corners, as she had found them.
The name on the mail read Ms. Sally Cavanaugh, and Ms. Cavanaugh would never know that while she was in the Poconos, a random woman had entered her house through an unlocked window and served wine à la Rohypnol in her kitchen. That's what she got for broadcasting her vacation plans all over the local post office. Alice had taken a train from Philly to the little town, scoped it out until she found an empty house, then taken a cab here in the dark, so nobody would see her.
She went to the living room, sliding her cell phone from her shorts. She flipped it open with a thumb and pressed until she found the photo. She had hauled Cavanaugh's things up from the basement, put them back in the living room, and compared the scene with the photo to make sure it was all in order; family and Siamese cat photos on the end tables, quilted knitting bag next to the worn brown chair, bestselling novels stacked on the credenza.
She picked up her black cloth bag and Bennie's messenger bag, then locked the front door by pressing the button on its knob. She twisted the deadbolt to lock, slid up the screen on the window, then climbed onto the porch, closing the window behind her. It was already dark because it had taken her so long to get rid of Bennie. A yellow bug light shone by the door, but no one was around to see her anyway. A thick woods screened the house from view, and it was surrounded by horse pastures. The air was humid and smelled like horse manure. She hurried down the porch steps, her footfalls pounding on the wood. She wasn't sorry to leave the country.
She dug her hand into the messenger bag and found the keys to Bennie's maroon Lexus, glistening in the driveway. She hit the button on the fob, opened the door, and jumped inside. She twisted on the ignition, reversed out of the driveway, then drove onto the private dirt road, spraying dirt and stones. She followed the road as it wound through the woods, passing battered black mailboxes until she reached the main road, then the highway. The air-conditioning blasted cold, and her tank top was finally drying. She'd worked up a sweat dragging Bennie into the backseat.
She hit the gas and relaxed into the ride. Everything was going according to plan. She'd been working at PLG during the day, but started moonlighting with a side business of her own, managing two women who sold Xanax, Ambien, Vikes, and Oxys to housewives at a gym and an upscale boutique. She fell into it when she met her boyfriend Q, who ran a full-scale operation all over the Northeast. He supplied her, but he would've taken a cut if he knew how much she really charged. The ladies who lunch weren't driving their Land Rovers to 52nd and Diamond for their Lexapro. But last week, she'd taken one risk too many.
Men.
Bad boys were her weakness, and though she'd had a good thing going with Q, even the CEO gets boring after a while. She'd hooked up with one of Q's runners, Jimmy, and they had some fun for a few weeks, on the down. But when Jimmy didn't show up to meet her, two nights ago, she guessed what must've happened. Q was a badass and he wouldn't stop until he'd disappeared her, too. He had people everywhere, and if one of his crew ever got ahold of her, she'd beg them not to take her alive. Bottom line, she had to get away, so she decided to become her rich sister long enough to take her money and run. The scam shouldn't take more than a few days. Alice would have killed Bennie but she didn't want to see her face on a dead body, especially not in that horrible suit.
Who still shops at Brooks?
She hit the gas, feeling her pulse quicken as the car accelerated through the dark night, over open road. She stayed the speed limit, but it was killing her. She loved to go fast, she fed on the sensation. She always wanted faster, bigger, better, newer, harder. She moved on when she got bored or restless, she specialized in cutting her losses. Life wasn't a dress rehearsal after all, and Alice lived hers to the fullest. She couldn't help the way she was. It was all because of her childhood, which was too damn good.
She sped along, thinking of her parents, John and Vilna Connelly, proprietors of the Connelly Insurance Agency, in Vineland, New Jersey. They'd lived a small, quiet life, taking good care of her, giving her the requisite pink bedroom in their split-level, sending her to the local public school, and making sure she had all the right lessons, but she never loved them. She didn't feel connected to them at all, probably because she knew inside that she wasn't.
She had grown up feeling apart from them, even before she ever heard the word "adoption." She knew she didn't look like them; she was blond and they were both dark-haired, and she surpassed them in height as early as middle school. The biggest difference was temperament; she was big, loud, and wanted everything, and they were small, meek, and wanted nothing. But every time she had asked them if she was adopted, they'd denied it, and even now, she wasn't angry that they lied, just that they were so bad at it. And when they'd died together a few years ago, in a car accident with a drunk driver, she went to their funeral and could barely squeeze out a tear.
She reached into the messenger bag, fumbled around for a Kleenex, spit on it, and wiped off her makeup. Then she lowered the window to ruin her blow-dry, and by the time she got to Philly, her hair was as curly as Bennie's. She steered into her exclusive neighborhood in Fairmount, near her beloved Schuylkill River. The houses were colonial with painted shutters, and BMWs and SUVs lined the street. She pulled into a parking space, twisted on the interior light, and smiled at the reflection in the rearview mirror. She looked exactly like Bennie, at least from the neck up.
"Hi, I'm Bennie Rosato," she said, practicing in the quiet car. "Pleased to meet you, I'm Bennie. Bennie Rosato."
She cut the ignition, grabbed her cloth bag and Bennie's messenger bag, got out of the car, and chirped it locked. Two men walked past her, talking, and she kept her head down. She hoped she didn't run into any of Bennie's neighbors because her twin never dressed this good. She reached Bennie's house, a three-story brick rowhouse with shiny black shutters, climbed the front steps, and picked the key that said Schlage as the house key. It slid easily into the lock, and she opened the front door, went in, and let it close behind her. She felt for a light switch, flipped it on, and stopped dead. She had forgotten one thing. Bennie had a big dog.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Think Twice by Lisa Scottoline. Copyright © 2010 Lisa Scottoline. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Reading Group Guide
An Original Essay by the Author
On its surface, Think Twice is the story of an evil twin who takes over the life of a good twin, and the question is whether the good or evil twin will survive.
But that's only the surface.
And appearances can be deceiving.
Those of you who are in book clubs like to dig deeper, and I appreciate your reading me, so I'll take this opportunity to break the wall between us and tell you frankly what inspired this novel, because to me, the surface is only part of what's going on in Think Twice.
But first, some background.
Where did I get the idea for Think Twice?
Believe it or not, I got the original inspiration from my own life--a decade or so ago, when I learned I had a half sister. I didn't learn of her existence until I was an adult, and she was a daughter of my father's, who was put up for adoption at birth. Happily, she had a wonderful adoptive experience, but after the passing of her adoptive father, she came to find her birth father, a difficult journey for her, and one which I honor, so much. But it was difficult for me, too, because when she surfaced, my experience was profoundly odd. I thought I was the only daughter, but I wasn't. I thought I was the oldest daughter, but I wasn't. It reconfigured my family, and confused and bewildered me, for a time.
I felt found, when I didn't know I'd been lost.
And so, a lifelong experiment in nature verses nurture began, in my mind.
But let's be clear. My half sister is a wonderful person, and not the evil twin herein. On the contrary, she's really the good twin. She looks uncannily like me, down to the blue eyes we both got from our father, and I've come to know and love her. But I knew I'd have to write about my feelings, in a way.
You can't have this job and ignore an event like that, or you forfeit your laptop.
Though Think Twice stands alone, it is, in fact, the third of three novels that I began after I met my half sister. The first was Mistaken Identity and the second Dead Ringer, which together introduce Alice and her increasingly homicidal actions. And, yes, I always use my real emotions to inform my novels. All fiction writers aspire to write the truth, as paradoxical as that may sound. As Francis Ford Coppola says, "Nothing in my movies happened, but everything is true." And the psychological journey that Bennie Rosato takes over the arc of these three novels was informed by my own feelings and gives Think Twice its emotional truth and power.
Especially because I believe that characterization is the most important part of any novel, what better way to delve deeply into character than through the trope of a good and evil twin? To me, what's really happening in Think Twice is that after Alice does all those terrible things to Bennie, Bennie finds that evil that lurks inside her own heart. And the real question in the novel is not will Bennie survive her twin, but will Bennie survive herself? Can she overcome the darker impulses for revenge and even murder that are stirred up, or maybe instigated, by Alice and her misconduct? Can Bennie get herself back, after she strays so far across the line between good and evil?
The English majors among you--and I know you are there, God bless you--will know that any good-and-evil-twin story inherits a long, rich literary tradition, which even has roots in modern psychology. To be specific, I was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and his story "William Wilson" when I first found out about my half sister and began to write about Bennie and Alice. If you haven't read Poe's stories, you should, and the one that haunted me was "William Wilson," and you'll see how it feeds into Think Twice.
Read on, as Poe would say.
"William Wilson" is the story of a schoolboy, and at the very outset, his identity is uncertain. In fact, Poe starts the story, "Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation."
Think "Call me Ishmael," but more intriguing.
Poe reportedly had an obsession with the color white, but we won't go into the parallels between him and Melville here. Suffice it to say that what happens in "William Wilson" is as epic a battle as with any white whale, but in Poe's story, the nemesis is the hero himself.
In the story, William Wilson meets a classmate who looks exactly like him. The other boy has the same name and even the same birthday. (Actually, William specifies that their shared birthday is "the nineteenth of January," which is Poe's own birthday.) He's the same height, too. They even enter the school on the same day, "by mere accident." The only difference between them is that the other boy has some defect in his throat that prevents him from raising his voice "above a very low whisper." Bottom line, the other boy is the double, or twin, of William Wilson.
The boys start out as uneasy friends, then the double does everything to make himself more like William Wilson, except that he can't copy his voice completely. William says, "His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own."
And interestingly, instead of the main character being the good one and the double being the bad one, in "William Wilson," the narrator is the bad one, and the double is the good one. It's so much more interesting, and bolder. Imagine Goofus and Gallant, with Goofus as the storyteller. Isn't he more fun to listen to than the goody-goody Gallant? Patricia Highsmith, the author of the Ripley series, and Jeff Lindsay, in the Dexter series, would make the same wise choice, though the first writer to do so may have been John Milton. In Paradise Lost, wasn't Satan more interesting than you-know-who?
But to stay on point, in William Wilson, the title character is witty, naughty, and an effete bully. He drinks too much, uses profanity, and cheats at cards. His double is nicer, kinder, and more considerate in every respect. In time, William Wilson comes to dislike, then hate his double. He leaves school to get away from him, then time passes and he goes to Eton, where one day, he invites "a small part of the most dissolute students" to his room for "a secret carousal." Bam! In walks his double, to spoil the fun. William Wilson says, "I grew perfectly sober in an instant."
The double is the buzzkill of the century.
William flees to Paris, his thoughts haunted by his doppelganger. He says, "again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions 'Who is he? whence came he? and what are his objects?' But no answer was there found." At war with itself, William's psyche begins to disintegrate. He generates into chronic gambling, drinking, and further debauchery until we see him at another card game, with an aristocratic "dupe" he plies with liquor, to cheat him more easily. Suddenly, the double reappears and blows William's cover, exposing his hidden cards when he says: "Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper."
Busted.
William hurries to Rome, decompensating further, and during a ball at Carnival, his lecherous eye falls upon the beautiful wife of a duke. Out of the blue, the double appears, this time masked and caped, to thwart our hero's misdeed. The two fall into a swordfight, and. . . .
Well, I can't give away the surprise ending. But you can read excerpts from the story following this essay.
So why do I think this story is so great, and how does it speak to me and inform Think Twice? I think it's in the pull of its terrific premise, the doubling between William Wilson and his look-alike. While it's unclear whether William and his double are two halves of the same whole, or two separate people, the dramatic effect is the same. His fragmented or broken identity terrifies us at a profound level, and when it's the protagonist who's having an identity crisis, we're placed squarely in his very shaky shoes. So it's impossible to read "William Wilson" and not identify with William, feeling his anguish and his evil, both at once.
And the threat is so much greater when it comes from within, as in this story of psychological horror, than from without, as in a conventional ghost story. Poe knew that no monster is half as scary as the evil within us, and it's tempting to wonder if he "wrote what he knew," considering his own personal unhappiness and the fact that he assigned William Wilson his own birthday. Read that way, the story is poignant indeed.
Plus, Poe may not have invented the evil twin, but he certainly anticipated it, as well as exploiting the spookiness that comes from the fragmenting or doubling of the self, and the splintering of identity. Sigmund Freud would later explain its psychology in his seminal essays The Uncanny, written in 1919, but there's no doubt that the concept gives "William Wilson" its dramatic impact.
And the hold that doubling has on our collective psyche is underlined by its more recent examples in popular culture, from benign sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show to the comic book conflict of Superman and his evil flip side, Venom. Think, too, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the man looks like your husband but he's not your husband. Or vice versa, in The Stepford Wives, when the terrified wife stumbles upon her own replica.
Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels trade on the doubling concept, when our hero flashes back on a self he doesn't know, remember, or even recognize. Bourne's confusion about his own identity, and whether he is fundamentally good or evil echoes "William Wilson." And there's even a hint of identity duality, or a split self, in Stephen King's classic, The Shining, in which a frustrated writer takes a job as a hotel caretaker, loses his mind, and tries to kill his family. Not only is the caretaker a double of a previous caretaker, who had followed the same deranged path, but we see how easily good dad crosses the median to become evil dad, when a hotel and a blank page drive him crazy.
The blank page, I know well.
And the interesting thing is that, as an author, I've learned that the page is never really blank. The blank page is full of an author's life, experience, and even surprise sisters. It's all there, even before I sit down to write.
After you've read Think Twice, do take a second to see if you can find the similarities between my personal story, "William Wilson," and the novel. They're there.
Lurking.
And thanks again, for taking the time to read me.
I am honored, and very grateful.
Ideas for Bookclubs
I am a huge fan of book clubs because it means people are reading and discussing books. Mix that with wine and carbs, and you can't keep me away. I'm deeply grateful to all who read me, and especially honored when my book is chosen by a book club. I wanted an opportunity to say thank you to those who read me, which gave me the idea of a contest. Every year I hold a book club contest and the winning book club gets a visit from me and a night of fabulous food and good wine. To enter is easy: all you have to do is take a picture of your entire book club with each member holding a copy of my newest hardcover and send it to me by mail or e-mail. No book club is too small or too big. Don't belong to a book club? Start one. Just grab a loved one, a neighbor or friend, and send in your picture of you each holding my newest book. I look forward to coming to your town and wining and dining your group. For more details, just go to www.scottoline.com.
Tour time is my favorite time of year because I get to break out my fancy clothes and meet with interesting and fun readers around the country. The rest of the year I am a homebody, writing every day, but thrilled to be able to connect with readers through e-mail. I read all my e-mail, and answer as much as I can. So, drop me a line about books, families, pets, love, or whatever is on your mind at lisa@scottoline.com. For my latest book and tour information, special promotions, and updates you can sign up at www.scottoline.com for my newsletter.
Interviews
An Original Essay by the Author
On its surface, Think Twice is the story of an evil twin who takes over the life of a good twin, and the question is whether the good or evil twin will survive.
But that's only the surface.
And appearances can be deceiving.
Those of you who are in book clubs like to dig deeper, and I appreciate your reading me, so I'll take this opportunity to break the wall between us and tell you frankly what inspired this novel, because to me, the surface is only part of what's going on in Think Twice.
But first, some background.
Where did I get the idea for Think Twice?
Believe it or not, I got the original inspiration from my own life--a decade or so ago, when I learned I had a half sister. I didn't learn of her existence until I was an adult, and she was a daughter of my father's, who was put up for adoption at birth. Happily, she had a wonderful adoptive experience, but after the passing of her adoptive father, she came to find her birth father, a difficult journey for her, and one which I honor, so much. But it was difficult for me, too, because when she surfaced, my experience was profoundly odd. I thought I was the only daughter, but I wasn't. I thought I was the oldest daughter, but I wasn't. It reconfigured my family, and confused and bewildered me, for a time.
I felt found, when I didn't know I'd been lost.
And so, a lifelong experiment in nature verses nurture began, in my mind.
But let's be clear. My half sister is a wonderful person, and not the evil twin herein. On the contrary, she's really the good twin. She looks uncannily like me, down to the blue eyes we both got from our father, and I've come to know and love her. But I knew I'd have to write about my feelings, in a way.
You can't have this job and ignore an event like that, or you forfeit your laptop.
Though Think Twice stands alone, it is, in fact, the third of three novels that I began after I met my half sister. The first was Mistaken Identity and the second Dead Ringer, which together introduce Alice and her increasingly homicidal actions. And, yes, I always use my real emotions to inform my novels. All fiction writers aspire to write the truth, as paradoxical as that may sound. As Francis Ford Coppola says, "Nothing in my movies happened, but everything is true." And the psychological journey that Bennie Rosato takes over the arc of these three novels was informed by my own feelings and gives Think Twice its emotional truth and power.
Especially because I believe that characterization is the most important part of any novel, what better way to delve deeply into character than through the trope of a good and evil twin? To me, what's really happening in Think Twice is that after Alice does all those terrible things to Bennie, Bennie finds that evil that lurks inside her own heart. And the real question in the novel is not will Bennie survive her twin, but will Bennie survive herself? Can she overcome the darker impulses for revenge and even murder that are stirred up, or maybe instigated, by Alice and her misconduct? Can Bennie get herself back, after she strays so far across the line between good and evil?
The English majors among you--and I know you are there, God bless you--will know that any good-and-evil-twin story inherits a long, rich literary tradition, which even has roots in modern psychology. To be specific, I was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe and his story "William Wilson" when I first found out about my half sister and began to write about Bennie and Alice. If you haven't read Poe's stories, you should, and the one that haunted me was "William Wilson," and you'll see how it feeds into Think Twice.
Read on, as Poe would say.
"William Wilson" is the story of a schoolboy, and at the very outset, his identity is uncertain. In fact, Poe starts the story, "Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation."
Think "Call me Ishmael," but more intriguing.
Poe reportedly had an obsession with the color white, but we won't go into the parallels between him and Melville here. Suffice it to say that what happens in "William Wilson" is as epic a battle as with any white whale, but in Poe's story, the nemesis is the hero himself.
In the story, William Wilson meets a classmate who looks exactly like him. The other boy has the same name and even the same birthday. (Actually, William specifies that their shared birthday is "the nineteenth of January," which is Poe's own birthday.) He's the same height, too. They even enter the school on the same day, "by mere accident." The only difference between them is that the other boy has some defect in his throat that prevents him from raising his voice "above a very low whisper." Bottom line, the other boy is the double, or twin, of William Wilson.
The boys start out as uneasy friends, then the double does everything to make himself more like William Wilson, except that he can't copy his voice completely. William says, "His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own."
And interestingly, instead of the main character being the good one and the double being the bad one, in "William Wilson," the narrator is the bad one, and the double is the good one. It's so much more interesting, and bolder. Imagine Goofus and Gallant, with Goofus as the storyteller. Isn't he more fun to listen to than the goody-goody Gallant? Patricia Highsmith, the author of the Ripley series, and Jeff Lindsay, in the Dexter series, would make the same wise choice, though the first writer to do so may have been John Milton. In Paradise Lost, wasn't Satan more interesting than you-know-who?
But to stay on point, in William Wilson, the title character is witty, naughty, and an effete bully. He drinks too much, uses profanity, and cheats at cards. His double is nicer, kinder, and more considerate in every respect. In time, William Wilson comes to dislike, then hate his double. He leaves school to get away from him, then time passes and he goes to Eton, where one day, he invites "a small part of the most dissolute students" to his room for "a secret carousal." Bam! In walks his double, to spoil the fun. William Wilson says, "I grew perfectly sober in an instant."
The double is the buzzkill of the century.
William flees to Paris, his thoughts haunted by his doppelganger. He says, "again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions 'Who is he? whence came he? and what are his objects?' But no answer was there found." At war with itself, William's psyche begins to disintegrate. He generates into chronic gambling, drinking, and further debauchery until we see him at another card game, with an aristocratic "dupe" he plies with liquor, to cheat him more easily. Suddenly, the double reappears and blows William's cover, exposing his hidden cards when he says: "Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper."
Busted.
William hurries to Rome, decompensating further, and during a ball at Carnival, his lecherous eye falls upon the beautiful wife of a duke. Out of the blue, the double appears, this time masked and caped, to thwart our hero's misdeed. The two fall into a swordfight, and. . . .
Well, I can't give away the surprise ending. But you can read excerpts from the story following this essay.
So why do I think this story is so great, and how does it speak to me and inform Think Twice? I think it's in the pull of its terrific premise, the doubling between William Wilson and his look-alike. While it's unclear whether William and his double are two halves of the same whole, or two separate people, the dramatic effect is the same. His fragmented or broken identity terrifies us at a profound level, and when it's the protagonist who's having an identity crisis, we're placed squarely in his very shaky shoes. So it's impossible to read "William Wilson" and not identify with William, feeling his anguish and his evil, both at once.
And the threat is so much greater when it comes from within, as in this story of psychological horror, than from without, as in a conventional ghost story. Poe knew that no monster is half as scary as the evil within us, and it's tempting to wonder if he "wrote what he knew," considering his own personal unhappiness and the fact that he assigned William Wilson his own birthday. Read that way, the story is poignant indeed.
Plus, Poe may not have invented the evil twin, but he certainly anticipated it, as well as exploiting the spookiness that comes from the fragmenting or doubling of the self, and the splintering of identity. Sigmund Freud would later explain its psychology in his seminal essays The Uncanny, written in 1919, but there's no doubt that the concept gives "William Wilson" its dramatic impact.
And the hold that doubling has on our collective psyche is underlined by its more recent examples in popular culture, from benign sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show to the comic book conflict of Superman and his evil flip side, Venom. Think, too, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the man looks like your husband but he's not your husband. Or vice versa, in The Stepford Wives, when the terrified wife stumbles upon her own replica.
Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels trade on the doubling concept, when our hero flashes back on a self he doesn't know, remember, or even recognize. Bourne's confusion about his own identity, and whether he is fundamentally good or evil echoes "William Wilson." And there's even a hint of identity duality, or a split self, in Stephen King's classic, The Shining, in which a frustrated writer takes a job as a hotel caretaker, loses his mind, and tries to kill his family. Not only is the caretaker a double of a previous caretaker, who had followed the same deranged path, but we see how easily good dad crosses the median to become evil dad, when a hotel and a blank page drive him crazy.
The blank page, I know well.
And the interesting thing is that, as an author, I've learned that the page is never really blank. The blank page is full of an author's life, experience, and even surprise sisters. It's all there, even before I sit down to write.
After you've read Think Twice, do take a second to see if you can find the similarities between my personal story, "William Wilson," and the novel. They're there.
Lurking.
And thanks again, for taking the time to read me.
I am honored, and very grateful.
Ideas for Bookclubs
I am a huge fan of book clubs because it means people are reading and discussing books. Mix that with wine and carbs, and you can't keep me away. I'm deeply grateful to all who read me, and especially honored when my book is chosen by a book club. I wanted an opportunity to say thank you to those who read me, which gave me the idea of a contest. Every year I hold a book club contest and the winning book club gets a visit from me and a night of fabulous food and good wine. To enter is easy: all you have to do is take a picture of your entire book club with each member holding a copy of my newest hardcover and send it to me by mail or e-mail. No book club is too small or too big. Don't belong to a book club? Start one. Just grab a loved one, a neighbor or friend, and send in your picture of you each holding my newest book. I look forward to coming to your town and wining and dining your group. For more details, just go to www.scottoline.com.
Tour time is my favorite time of year because I get to break out my fancy clothes and meet with interesting and fun readers around the country. The rest of the year I am a homebody, writing every day, but thrilled to be able to connect with readers through e-mail. I read all my e-mail, and answer as much as I can. So, drop me a line about books, families, pets, love, or whatever is on your mind at lisa@scottoline.com. For my latest book and tour information, special promotions, and updates you can sign up at www.scottoline.com for my newsletter.
Related Subjects
Videos
