The Other One by Catherine Turney. Henry Holt (1952), 248 pp.
Katy Hazelton, an L. A. fashion buyer in her early thirties, receives an invitation from her youngter sister, Miranda, to come for a visit in Carmel. The two women have been drifting apart since Miranda married ad executive Dick Anthony a few years before. When Katy arrives, she learns that her sister is troubled by strange dreams. Then one evening Miranda has something like an epileptic fit. She seems to emerge with a completely new personality, that of Dick’s first wife, Felicia, who died six years before. Katy must determine whether this has actually happened and, if so, how she can get her sister back.
This book begins with an interesting premise that leads to a puzzling question: Do dead people, especially those who died young through no fault of their own, deserve some sympathy if they try to return to life? Unfortunately, Turney doesn’t grapple with that issue. Instead, by way of Katy’s narration, the author paints Felicia as a nasty and willful woman who probably didn’t even deserve her first life. The book then focuses on occult practitioners in Carmel and the techniques they use (voodoo, black magic, etc.) to make bad things happen. Turney’s writing style is too pedestrian to produce scary scenes and her plot construction relies on too many unlikely episodes to generate much overall tension. Even a small modern audience for the book seems unlikely. Judging from the trailer, however, the movie version (Back from the Dead, 1957) might be a kick.
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