What’s Double Room all about?:
Double Room focuses on an older man who after losing his wife begins to hear strange and disturbing things in the hotel room next to him.
What did I think?:
I’ve only come across the author Ramsey Campbell once before and it was another short story, Getting It Wrong from the collection A Book Of Horrors. I did enjoy what I read there and was delighted to discover on opening a brand new short story collection, The New Uncanny, that the first story was penned by him. Like his previous short story, the author has a real knack for making the reader feel supremely uncomfortable word by word, page by page until the very satisfying and ominous finale.
As I mentioned, this is a new short stories collection for my challenge, after completing a previous book, Vampires In The Lemon Grove by Karen Russell in 2016. All my reviews for the short stories there if you’re interested can be found in my archive, available on the main page under the author’s name. Back to The New Uncanny though – I have to admit to feeling a thrill when an editor of a collection does a little introduction at the beginning of the book. This one, edited by Ra Page was especially fun to read and he does an excellent job of describing the uncanny:
“…the uncanny is that which may be familiar, or ordinary, but somehow disturbs us, makes us uncomfortable, and in some cases gives us the full on willies.”
Double Room is a brilliant example of the uncanny and uses a trope often employed by those writing horror stories, that is the double or doppelganger that our main character finds himself confronted with. His name is Edwin Ferguson and he’s a man recently bereaved after losing his beloved wife after a long illness. When we first meet him, he’s trying to get off with a couple of girls in a hotel bar and is instantly unlikeable for the reader. However, when he goes upstairs to bed, our attitude might change to pity when he starts to experience a queer thing. Every move he makes, word he speaks etc appears to be mirrored by the same behaviour/sound in the adjoining room to his own. At first, it seems like a coincidence but it is not long before the echo of his own voice begins to terrify him and he alerts hotel staff who show him that the room is clearly empty (*shiver*).
I don’t want to say too much about the plot but it is safe to say that his guilt over his wife’s death (more specifically, his internal reaction to it when her death happened) is playing on his mind and becoming tortuous. The words that are being repeated back to him from the doppelganger, as they are muffled, could be mis-interpreted as something else and seems to suggest that Edwin was relieved for her eventual death. By the end of the story, I had done a complete revolution of my feelings against the main character and just felt terribly sorry for him. The mocking echo of your own “double,” was quite a frightening aspect to read about and I think the author did a phenomenal job with both the plot and the creep factor which certainly gave me a few goosebumps along the way.
Would I recommend it?:
But of course!
Star rating (out of 5):
NEXT SHORT STORY CHALLENGE: The Adventure Of The Engineer’s Thumb by Arthur Conan Doyle from the collection The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes
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