Double, Double
Reviewed date: 2025 Apr 6
Rating: 2
222 pages
Exceedingly competent
Double, Double is a competent book—exceedingly competent. Competently plotted, competently paced, competently written, competently tied up with no loose plot threads. Competent all around.
Monster from the deep
It’s barely science fiction. A shapeshifting people-eating monster crawls out of the ocean depths and eats a few people and a dog, but is stopped just in time by a plucky constable, a hardworking scientist, and a hippie band riding high on their brush with fame after their top-20 hit song Seadeath.
Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Bruno Twentyman and his fellow bandmates and girlfriends—Gideon "Gid" Hard (the West Indian), Glenn Salmon (the American), Nancy Lane, Cressida "Cress" Beggarstaff, and Liz Howell—are driving their converted Ford Transit van along the English coastline looking for a particular beach Glenn thinks would be great for an "open-air freakout." They run into Tom Reedwall and his dog Inkosi. Tom works at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Brindown Research Station. Tom points them to the beach they're looking for
Dead man walking
The band has a picnic at the beach. The girls do a little skinny-dipping but it's all very tame. Very tame, until a man's body washes up. He's alive and moving, but not breathing, which is odd. The band tries to pull him up onto the beach, but he seems reluctant to leave the water. When they see his face is half eaten away, the band freaks out and runs off.
Constable Sellers
Bruno heads to the local police station and makes a report to Sergeant Branksome, Constable Roger Sellers, and reporter Joseph Leigh-Warden. They figure it's a hoax, but Branksome decides to have it checked out just in case.
Double, Double
Thus begins a mystery. The locals try to piece it together, but the clues don't fit. The man that Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition saw is the pilot of a recently crashed airplane, but that was days ago and he couldn't possibly still be alive. Miss Beeding, a batty old woman who lives near that beach, disappears—seemingly the victim of a struggle in her home. Later she turns up a whole town away in Geddesley, where she's talking incoherently and has a violent aversion to being touched. She's placed in a mental institution. But Constable Sellers sees Miss Beeding in Brindown while she's still in the mental institution in Geddesley. Can there be two of her? Later, Miss Beeding disappears from her locked room in the mental institution, but the duty nurse now exhibits the same symptoms: incomprehensible mutterings and an aversion to being touched.
Shapeshifters
Brunner weaves the threads of the story together competently. It was a shapeshifting monster from the ocean depths, somehow thrust up to the ocean's surface. Desperate for food, it consumed the pilot's body. Then, following its nature, mimicked the form of the creature it has just consumed. The shapeshifting creature feeds every few days, consuming whatever prey it can find, doubling its own mass, dividing into two creatures, and taking the form of whatever it consumed. Constable Sellers, Sergeant Branksome, Tom Reedwall, Bruno and the band, and many others work together to track down and kill the creatures before they can escape into the English countryside and ravage an unsuspecting population.