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\u00a9 Coronet Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019ll be Halloween in a fortnight\u2019s time.\u00a0 I was reminded of this when, the other day, I saw the British press start on its annual pre-Halloween custom of complaining about British people celebrating Halloween too enthusiastically.\u00a0 They shouldn\u2019t be doing this because, supposedly, the festival isn\u2019t British but American.\u00a0 Here\u2019s<\/a> the latest whinge from Guardian<\/strong> columnist Zoe Williams.\u00a0 It seems to have escaped these British (i.e., English) commentators that Halloween started long ago in Scotland (still a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (part of which is still a constituent nation, or province, of the United Kingdom) and was then brought to America by Scottish and Irish settlers.\u00a0 So, if you view Halloween as \u2018un-British\u2019, you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.\u00a0 Or maybe you believe Scotland and Northern Ireland aren\u2019t still part of clapped-out Brexit Britain.\u00a0 If only\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Anyway, as is my<\/strong> pre-Halloween custom every year, here\u2019s the first of a few entries that are in keeping with the creepiness of the season.\u00a0 I begin with a review of the bestselling 1971 horror novel The<\/strong> Other<\/strong> by Thomas Tryon.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thomas Tryon made his name rather spectacularly as a novelist in 1971 with his debut effort The<\/em> Other<\/em>.\u00a0 This spent more than half-a-year in The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies.\u00a0 It also \u2013 along with the similar success of Ira Levin\u2019s Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em> (1967) and William Peter Blatty\u2019s The Exorcist<\/em> (1971) \u2013 helped inspire a boom in horror fiction that meant during the 1970s and 1980s bookshop-racks and shelves were crammed with lurid-covered horror paperbacks while authors like John Farris, James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Dean Koontz, Graham Masterton, Robert R. McCammon, Michael McDowell, John Saul, Guy N. Smith and Whitley Streiber, not to mention a young Stephen King, had themselves \u2018a nice little earner\u2019.\u00a0 But before that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Tryon was better known as the TV and movie actor Tom<\/em> Tryon.\u00a0 And yes, this makes me sound ancient, but I knew him for his acting before I knew him for his writing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As a youngster, I was obsessed with sci-fi movies and westerns, so I remembered seeing him in 1958\u2019s sci-fi potboiler, the gloriously titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space<\/em>, and in the run-of-the-mill 1965 western (scripted by Sam Peckinpah) The<\/em> Glory<\/em> Guys<\/em>.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember him, but must also have seen him, in the epic 1963 recreation of the D-Day landings The Longest Day<\/em>, in which he acted alongside John Wayne.\u00a0 However, as that movie seemed to feature every actor in the American, British, French and German phonebooks at the time, it\u2019s not surprising that I missed him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 20th<\/sup> Century Fox<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a9 Columbia Pictures<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was surely frustrating for Tryon-the-actor that his biggest roles were in B-movies, while in more prestigious fare he was relegated to the supporting cast.\u00a0 Plus, to supplement his movie income, he had to do a lot of TV work.\u00a0 Perhaps the closest he came to the big time was playing the main character in Otto Preminger\u2019s prestigious 1963 move The Cardinal<\/em>, an adaptation of Henry Morton Robinson\u2019s hugely bestselling \u2013 but now forgotten \u2013 novel of the same name from 1950.\u00a0 Ironically, this may have been the film that made him resolve to give up acting, because he had a hideous time working with the notoriously dictatorial Preminger.\u00a0 According to the director\u2019s Wikipedia entry<\/a>, \u201cPreminger would scream at him, zoom in on his shaking hands, and repeatedly fire and rehire him, with the result that Tryon was hospitalised with a body rash and peeling skin, due to nerves.\u201d\u00a0 On his own Wikipedia entry<\/a>, Tryon is quoted as saying of The<\/em> Cardinal<\/em>, \u201cTo this day, I cannot look at that film. It’s because of Preminger.\u00a0 He was a tyrant who ruled by terror. \u00a0He tied me up in knots. He screamed at me. He called me names. \u00a0He said I was lazy. \u00a0He said I was a fool. \u00a0He never cursed me.\u00a0 His insults were far more personal.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I wonder if it\u2019s because of the horrors Preminger inflicted on him that when Tryon reinvented himself as a novelist, his first book, The<\/em> Other<\/em>, was a horror one.\u00a0 I also wonder if his debut was influenced by the fact that in 1960 he narrowly missed getting the role of Sam Loomis, \u00a0lover of Janet Leigh\u2019s doomed Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho<\/em>.\u00a0 The Psycho<\/em>-esque element becomes more noticeable the further you go into Tryon\u2019s novel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The<\/em> Other<\/em> centres on a sensitive, imaginative and kind-hearted boy called Niles Perry who lives in a large, rambling house in New England in 1935 with several family members: his agoraphobic mother Alexandra, his spritely Russian-emigrant grandmother Ada, his Uncle George, his Aunt Vee and his annoying cousin Russell\u2026 and his twin brother Holland, who despite being Niles\u2019s closest confidant is aloof, elusive and mean-spirited. \u00a0We get an idea of the meanness of Holland\u2019s spirit early on when we see him kill one of Russell\u2019s pet rats.\u00a0 Niles reacts to this with horror and promptly tries to give the unfortunate rodent a funeral using a \u2018Sunshine Biscuit box\u2019 as a coffin and a bunch of clover as a wreath.\u00a0 But out of misguided sibling loyalty, he refuses to believe his brother is a wrong \u2019un and persists in hanging out with him and trying to stay in his good books.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Meanwhile, a shadow hangs over the household thanks to the recent death of Niles and Holland\u2019s father Vining Perry.\u00a0 He died \u201cwhile moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage\u2026\u00a0 Father started down with a basket\u2026\u00a0 he was halfway down when, hearing a noise, he looked up to see the door, the heavy iron-bound trapdoor, come crashing down on his head\u2026\u201d\u00a0 As we learn more about Holland\u2019s malignant nature, we begin to wonder if Vining\u2019s death was really an accident.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The book features several more deaths, and near-deaths, and there\u2019s also a big, macabre twist that I have to say I saw coming from very early on.\u00a0 To be fair to Tryon, when he penned the book in 1971, that twist might have been less of a stale trope in horror fiction \u2013 it might have seemed fresh and caught his readers by genuine surprise.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What I find interesting, though, is that while the book contains its share of incidents, its pace feels very leisurely and in between the scary bits there\u2019s a lot of other stuff.\u00a0 You get back-stories \u2013 most notably Ada\u2019s, which describes her experiences as a young woman in Russia \u2013 and sub-plots, including one about a \u2018game\u2019 that the hyper-imaginative Niles plays with his grandmother, whereby he almost supernaturally projects himself into the bodies of other creatures, like birds and dragonflies, so that he can see the world through their eyes.\u00a0 Tryon, who was born in Connecticut in 1926 and would have been a boy too at this time, also delights in making references to the culture and events of the era \u2013 from the popular radio-comedy show Amos \u2018n\u2019 And<\/a>y<\/em> to the Irish tenor John McCormack<\/a>, to the hubbub over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s baby<\/a>. \u00a0Indeed, horribly, the plot echoes the Lindbergh case near the end.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You also get a lot of description of the house, its outhouses and grounds, the local town and the surrounding countryside. Tryon illustrates these things with a nice turn of phrase and embroiders the descriptions with precise details that no doubt come from his own childhood memories.\u00a0 Of a carnival that installs itself in the town one evening, he writes: \u201cOn either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-doll; Madam Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World\u2019s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.\u201d\u00a0 The Perrys\u2019 barn, meanwhile, is \u201cvenerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road.\u00a0 Upon the roof-tree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed.\u00a0 This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.\u201d\u00a0 At best, Tryon evokes the New England of his childhood with the vivacity that, say, Ray Bradbury evoked the Midwest or Davis Grubb<\/a> evoked the South.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I do wonder, though, if the book was submitted to a publisher today \u2013 when writers are urged to be economical with their prose and to-the-point with their plots \u2013 would it ever escape from the slush pile?\u00a0 Its fondness for descriptions and digressions, with the chills and nastiness served up only sporadically, makes it seem rather old-fashioned now…\u00a0 and not just because it\u2019s set in 1935.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But that\u2019s not meant as a criticism.\u00a0 The Other<\/em> was a slow read for me, and it took me time to get through it, but by the time I finished it I\u2019d found it a rewarding book.\u00a0 And it was a surprisingly downbeat one \u2013 the chills and nastiness, when they come, are<\/em> chilling and nasty.\u00a0 You needn\u2019t expect a happy ending for anyone, not even the youngest and most innocent of the book\u2019s characters.\u00a0 Indeed, as an author, Thomas Tryon treats his characters with a cruelty similar to that meted out to him, as an actor, by the ghastly Otto Preminger.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/JW-TT-in-TLD-300x147.jpg\")
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