The fear isn’t the monster under the bed. It’s the face in the mirror that looks back a moment too long.
The Other by Annie Neugebauer Review: Doppelganger Horror Done Right
That’s the territory Annie Neugebauer has been mapping for years. A two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, poet, and former Writer Unboxed columnist, Neugebauer built a reputation for horror that doesn’t shout. It whispers. It waits. And when you least expect it, it shows you something you can’t unsee. Her debut novella, The Extra, earned a rave from The Wall Street Journal, which called it “a nearly perfect, claustrophobic novella”. Jonathan Maberry praised its “disturbing tale of paranoia, identity, and horror packed with twists you absolutely won’t see coming”. Now comes The Other, the second instalment in The Outsiders Sequence, a shared-universe series of standalone novellas from Shortwave Publishing.
Neugebauer doesn’t need monsters when she has mirrors. The Other burrows into the terrifying possibility that selfhood might not be as fixed as we believe.
The Other by Annie Neugebauer (The Extra, You Have To Let Them Bleed) takes a deceptively simple premise and turns it into something quietly and utterly destabilizing. We meet two couples who cross paths on a remote hiking trail, and what begins as an awkward encounter quickly evolves into a psychological spiral that leaps off the page. Sit back and let Neugebauer slowly erode your idea of certainty. Let’s talk about it.
At the center of The Other is a relationship already carrying its own unspoken tensions. The couple’s retreat into nature feels, at first, like an attempt to reconnect and strip away distractions. The couple intends to focus on each other. But isolation has a way of amplifying what is already there, lurking just beneath the surface.
Neugebauer uses this stark, indifferent landscape to lay bare the couple’s emotional distance. When they meet the second couple, they soon begin to feel uneasy. The other pair seem to know them a little too well, to echo them a tad too precisely. The interactions are just off center in a subtle, almost imperceptible way. They start to look a bit too familiar as the night continues. This is where the story thrives.
Neugebauer excels here. Rather than overexplaining the phenomenon, she lets the tension build through the small and uncanny details. A shared memory recounted with just enough difference to plant a seed of doubt, a gesture that is familiar but also … wrong. Conversations seem to loop in on themselves. The question is not whether the doubles are real, and what “real” even means in this situation where identity can be so convincingly replicated. The horror is at its most existential, buried in the terrifying possibility that selfhood might not be as fixed as we believe.
What makes The Other particularly effective is how it ties the situation the main couple finds themselves in back to intimacy. Relationships are built on shared history and on assumption that the two people are witnessing and remembering the same life together. But what happens when that foundation becomes unstable? Neugebauer probes that idea with precision, forcing her characters and the reader to confront how much of love is tied to memory, and how much of identity is simply a story we agree to keep telling. The presence of the doubles becomes an external threat and a scary funhouse mirror, reflecting the cracks that already existed.
The Other‘s pacing is deliberate, favoring atmosphere over action, but never feels stagnant. Instead, there is a mounting sense of “shit hitting the fan”. An inevitability that the characters are being guided toward a conclusion they can’t articulate but know is coming. The wilderness setting plays a crucial role in this, as its vastness underscores their vulnerability and the sense that they have stepped outside the boundaries of normal reality. There is no easy escape.
Neugebauer’s prose is clean and controlled, as always. She is just a master, allowing the strangeness of the situation to take center stage without unnecessary embellishment. She trusts the reader to sit with ambiguity, and that trust pays off. The novella does not rush to provide definitive answers, and instead leaves space for interpretation in a way that is intentional versus evasive. By the end, the central questions linger: if someone else carries every memory you do, what separates you from them? And if no one can tell the difference, does that distinction even matter?
This type of resolution strikes a careful balance between closure and uncertainty. There is a sense of completion without comfort. Neugebauer resists neatly tying it all together, choosing instead to leave the reader in that in-between space where multiple interpretations can be true. It is that kind of ending that invites reflection rather than finality, encouraging you to revisit the earlier moments and reconsider anything you think you understood.
The Other is quiet, unnerving exploration of identity, memories, and the fragile constructs that hold relationships together. It does not use overt horror scenes to make its impact. Instead, it drives itself under your skin, asking questions that don’t have easy answers and refuses to let them go. For readers who appreciate psychological horror that calls for introspection, this story will stick with you. The Other is subtle in its execution, but deeply disquieting in its implications.
Thank you to Shortwave Publishing for the ARC copy. This story had me on the edge of my seat and I could not recommend it more. You can preorder this book now over on Shortwave’s website. The Other is book two of The Outsiders sequence. The Extra (book one) is available now and book three is forthcoming from Shortwave Books. The Other publishes June 09, 2026 so make sure you pick it up!
The Other (The Outsiders Sequence Book 2) by Annie Neugebauer
“Very effective… a nearly perfect, claustrophobic novella.” —The Wall Street Journal on the first book in the series, The Extra
It’s not a sequel. It’s next in the sequence…
A couple on an outdoor retreat meet their doppelgangers on a hiking trail and are soon tested on how well they truly know each other.
The Other is the second book in the Outsiders Sequence series. This edition features a special preview of The Spare, the third and final book in the Outsiders Sequence.
“Very effective… A nearly perfect, claustrophobic novella.” ― The Wall Street Journal, on the first book in the series The Extra
