The Other emerged wholesale from wherever it had been, until then, lying in wait for me.  I had only to tap into the vein of my adolescence to open the subterranean terrain where it had coalesced on its own.

The Other is set in Seattle in the mid to late 20th century--my own milieu.  It's loosely autobiographical in its externals, but deeply so in the questions it examines.  It's the story of a friendship between doppelgangers of a kind, or between shadow figures--two young men who, because they are versions of one another, are locked in a friendship freighted with responsibilities.

The novel's narrator, Neil Countryman, becomes an English teacher and, comfortably so, petit bourgeois, with all the happy mediums and daily contentments therein entailed.  Meanwhile his mirror image, or alter ego, John William Barry, devolves into a mountain-dwelling hermit who purports to brook no compromise.  And so I explored my own inner terrain, in a novel that, with passing years, remains exceedingly close to my heart.