INTRODUCTION: Around 1989, two things came together to inspire me to write the novel Doppleganger: my reading of the Time-Life "Mysteries Of The Unknown" book Phantom Encounters, and...the Tears For Fears song "Sowing The Seeds Of Love." Encounters introduced me to the multitude of ghosts supposedly inhabiting the Tower of London and its environs, and added to my budding knowledge of the concept of the doppelganger (or, as I consistently misspelled it in my writing, "doppleganger"), a sort of "ghost of the living" (supposedly everybody has one--according to the Encyclopedia Of Things That Never Were, it can act up if you treat it poorly!). I decided to write a story using the characters from the D4D and King Kuts storylines, sending them to the Tower to have a lot of run-ins with creepy ghosts. Interestingly, Chernobyl Cat's encounters with his own doppelganger mirror my much-later unwritten stories about Detective Kristeva versus his Shadow archetype...ooo, pre-Jungianism! As I recall it, this was meant to be merely one in a series; the sequel, of which I may not have written a single line, was called Doppleganger 2: Double Trouble! *cue rimshot* This story was written in a composition book, my favorite mode of storytelling back then. If you have the book Phantom Encounters, you can follow along and see the various ghosts that I employed here.
"Sowing The Seeds Of Love"? It has nothing whatsoever to do with this story. In fact, I have no clue whatsoever why I associate it with this story so much--but I remember it playing on the radio all the time back then, so I can definitively date at least the start of this book to 1989-90.
Front,
Chapter 1,
Chapter 2,
Chapter 3,
Chapter 4
Doppleganger [sic]
Notice: the names of places in England are real, but the places themselves are made up.
[Note--precursor to my current disclaimers for Minot and my depiction of Niagara Falls in Escape From Manitou Island--places I have never seen! I play VERY fast and loose with the British sites in this story.]
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