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3.0 

The Dark Other

By Stanley G. Weinbaum
The Dark Other by Stanley G. Weinbaum digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Stanley Weinbaum’s The Dark Other was first written sometime in the 1920’s under the name The Mad Brain. The manuscript went unpublished until 1950, where it was posthumously released with edits by Forrest J. Ackerman.

Patricia Lane is a spirited young woman, in the midst of a passionate relationship with Nicholas Devine, a writer with a fascination with horror. When he starts to show bizarre personality shifts, she turns to her neighbor, a talented psychologist, to discover the source of these outbursts.

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3 Reviews

3.0
“I thought this was an interesting story about a headstrong woman entering the biggest red flag of a relationship. Towards the end of the book, it was hard to stop reading since I just had to know what happened next.”
“<a>reviews.metaphorosis.com</a> 1.5 stars Pat is a beautiful young woman with many admirers. Nick is a young man with a secret. When his dark side interferes with their burgeoning love, things turn grim, and psychologist Carl Horker has to intervene. Most people, including me, know of Stanly Weinbaum from his great debut story, "A Martian Odyssey". He wrote a dozen other, mostly good, short storiesas well. I also recently read one of his novels, The New Adam, an effective if somewhat clinical thought experiment. I had fair hope, therefore, for this book. It seems The Dark Other was written in the 1920s, well before Weinbaum published his first story. He would have been in his late teens or early twenties, and it shows , vividly. To be blunt, this is a bad book. The story is thin, Weinbaum relies heavily on weak gimmicks, and the characters are of pretty stiff cardboard. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the time, the sexism is rampant. Even for the 1920s, talk of Pat's "clear, active little mind" is hard to take, as are the repeated comments that "every woman has a little masochism in her". The plot wraps up in a way that the coming Hollywood would approve of, and with a deus ex machina that a theater would envy. In short, a decidedly disappointing, even dismal effort from a writer who turned out some pretty good stuff. I can't recommend this to anyone. If you're a true Weinbaum fanatic, and have to read everything he ever read, don't read this. It's in the same territory as Roger Zelazny's The Dead Man's Brother - all it can do is tarnish your memory of a talented author. For everyone else, just pass this by. Not worth your time, and not representative of anything but an inexperienced young man who'd later write some pretty good stuff.”

About Stanley G. Weinbaum

Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (April 4, 1902 – December 14, 1935) was an American science fiction writer. His first story, "A Martian Odyssey", was published to great acclaim in July 1934; the alien Tweel was arguably the first character to satisfy John W. Campbell's challenge: "Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." Weinbaum wrote more short stories and a few novels, but died from lung cancer less than a year and a half later.

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