Mistaken
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Menace both real and imagined haunt two Dubliners in this “unsettling . . . seductive” modern Gothic “that ultimately leaves one gasping” (Irish Times).
“Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan’s films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic novel . . . of two look-alike men who feed off each other’s souls all their crisscrossed lives” (The New York Times).
Kevin Thunder and Gerald Spain have grown up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Kevin’s father is a bookie and his mother takes in lodgers on the city’s impoverished northside. Gerald, a lawyer’s son, is afforded a more well-heeled upbringing. Yet they share a growing awareness of each other through episodes of mistaken identity. At first, innocent enough—one approached by the other’s confused girlfriend, or being called out to in the street. But Kevin is unnerved by more than a doppelganger. He lives next door to the one-time home of Bram Stoker. And the shadows of the author’s evil creation, as well as those cast by a lookalike stranger, stretch far across his early years. It’s only when a tragic death sends both young men down a darker path, that Kevin and Gerald are destined to meet.
A “beautifully enigmatic . . . darkly luminous” (The New York Times Book Review) thriller, Mistaken is also “the best novel I’ve read about Dublin in years” (The Independent).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A case of mistaken identity sets the plot in motion in this meticulous, well-crafted novel from author and filmmaker Jordan (Interview with the Vampire). Kevin is growing up in working class North Dublin when unexplainable things begin to happen: strange girls press their hips against his in the dance club asking him why he hasn t called and men offer him cigarettes, despite his never having smoked. Eventually, it becomes clear that Kevin is being mistaken for another, a boy named Gerry from the wealthier side of town, who attends a posh school. Initially frightened, Kevin begins little by little to take advantage of these bizarre circumstances. Having led a young woman who insists they know one another down to a grassy section of the dunes, he s momentarily stumped, then lets the imagined him the other take over. Kevin and Gerry meet as adolescents, and so begins a lifetime s worth of chance encounters, misunderstandings, and intermittent life-swapping, culminating in a shared crime, that, as Kevin says, Gerald wanted but he (Kevin) executed. As one might expect from a seasoned filmmaker, the novel is well plotted and mysteries are revealed at a tantalizing pace. Nor is Jordan a slouch on the sentence level; the language is precise and evocative, with Dublin itself lovingly rendered in all its gray complexity.
