The Other One by Catherine Turney

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Black magic - pulsing with suspense.

This 1952 gothic thriller begins with strange happenings, the tension only increasing to the finale.

Katy visits her sister Miranda at the cottage in Carmel she shares with her husband Dick. Miranda's sunny personality and beauty seem dulled; perhaps she is nervous being five months pregnant. She confesses to Katy the sinking feeling something is trying to get at her, a voice inside her own head that exhausts her. That night, Miranda suddenly has a physical attack, stiffening and frothing at the mouth. Hospitalized, she has lost the baby, but even worse, she wakes up with dark eyes filled with hatred, an entirely different expression on her possessed face, calling herself Felicia.

Dick never told them about his first wife, presumed drowned, her body never found. Somehow Miranda acts and talks like Felicia; perhaps it's the shock of the seizure. Miranda demands to visit Felicia's parents, claiming to be their daughter and knowing intimate family secrets... "I've come back to you. I kept my promise to you." She wears Felicia's clothes and controls where Dick and Katy are at all times. Katy brings in Miranda's friend Molly and Dick's friend John to help—and they quickly enter the 'John-and-Katy' stage. John introduces his friend Nancy, who tells them of the secretive metaphysical meetings held by a Father Reynaud that Felicia attended—actually Black Masses. Felicia was a manipulative creature, a lover of the unnatural who sold her soul to the Devil, proven when a voodoo doll of Katy is used in paralyzing attacks. The spirit of Miranda becomes weaker, succumbing to the world of sleep, as Katy exposes a blood sacrifice, filled with a "cloying incense which dulls every sense but horror."

This was a solid possession thriller, filled with occultism without need for rational explanation. Felicia has ways to torture people into weakness, and she will never let Dick go, "even if I die, or he dies, he will never get away from me."

Catherine Turney was one of the first women screenwriters under contract at Warner Bros, writing such hits as The Man I Love, My Reputation, and uncredited on Mildred Pierce (which won Best Screenplay in 1946). For Paramount, she wrote No Man of Her Own, and adapted this novel as Back from the Dead in 1957.

1952 / Paperback / 224 pages