Saturday Review: “Railroads, Relationships, and Reality,” a review by Jessica Cory of Dean Marshall Tuck’s Twinless Twin (2025) forthcoming in NCLR Online Winter 2026.
Dean Marshall Tuck’s Twinless Twin, winner of the 2024 James Alan McPherson Prize, is a hauntingly beautiful exploration of family, memory, and the liminal spaces between reality and imagination. In her review, Jessica Cory highlights Tuck’s deliberate narrative choices that give the novel its eerie, dreamlike quality.
Told through the voices of multiple family members, Twinless Twin unfolds in a setting that blurs the boundaries between public and private, grounding its uncanny atmosphere in detailed natural landscapes. Cory writes, “The academic in me wants to draw attention to how this novel engages uncertainty and liminal spaces – those locations, states of being, and perceptions that exist in the in-between, not in clearcut binaries.” These vivid environmental details intensify the novel’s sense of mystery and elicit subtle elements of folklore.
Twinless Twin delves into the emotional terrain of fear and wonder, exploring what is frightening but focuses on how we perceive and respond to the unknown. “Seamlessly blending elements of horror, fantasy, and speculative fiction, Twinless Twin also seems to exist amid multiple genres – it has elements of environmental literature, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, bildungsroman, and other subgenres,” writes Cory. Tuck’s novel offers something for many kinds of readers.
Read the full review here and pick up your copy of Twinless Twin from the publisher, your local independent bookstore, or bookshop.org.
Join NCLR, ECU Thomas Harriot College of Arts & Sciences, and author Dean Marshall Tuck at a (belated) book release party this Thursday 2/19 at Joyner Library in Greenville, NC. Read more details about the event.
