Doppelgänger

Title: Doppelgänger
Author: Michael Parker
Rating 1 star

Doppelganger is an Australian novel that follows the story of Andrew, a young man in his late teens living in Sydney. Suddenly, there's a clash of two colliding Sydneys; very different from each other and Andrew is transported between his ordinary safe world and another strange, dirty and dangerous life with gang wars. Here he meets Josh, the nasty twin of his best friend who is the leader of one the drug-crazed gangs. Josh intoxicates all of his members, including Andrew, and induces them to kill the other group, Inner Station. Consequently, if someone gets hurt or murdered in one Sydney, it also happens in the other. It's up to Andrew to break the spell, stop the clashing of the two worlds and save as many innocent people as he can.

This is certainly the strangest book I have ever read and my opinion of it is quite terrible. However, even though I feel that the plot and characters are very annoying, Michael Parker did jump straight to the point and I was able to be drawn in by the first sentence in the prologue - "it was a few weeks before I killed my first person that the dizziness started." To open the novel with a quote from the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad would make any writer familiar with Conrad's work smile. Overall, though, I definitely won't be going back to read anymore of Parker's novels. I especially find the way the traveling between each Sydney is written immensely tedious. And the plot regarding what Andrew thinks he needs to do to his best friend is stupid. Doppelgänger is a book for people with quirky tastes and I'm afraid I am just not one of them.