A curious tale

Tuck tells a stirring story in Twinless Twin

Dean Marshall Tuck drew on his years working at a Transylvania County country club for his new novel, Twinless Twin (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), but the characters in the book are anything but private club elites.

Twinless Twin follows a hardscrabble mountain family rocked by the troubling actions of a mysterious son – a surviving twin – whose choices leave them searching for answers. The novel explores questions of responsibility, grief and what it means to move forward after tragedy.

Tuck said the idea for the novel arose when he watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. “They say Elvis Presley was probably the most famous twinless twin,” said Tuck ’03 ’08. “But people who have lost twins in utero or shortly after birth, they had experienced these unexplained feelings of guilt and loss. Something was missing from their lives.” In other cases, he said, it was an unseen presence, a guardian angel.

“I was thinking, too, about the mothers of school shooters, and what these mothers do to move on with the rest of their lives,” he said. “Certainly, you would find yourself looking backward over your life and what-ifs. What kind of launches the book, Chapter 1, is the mother, Martha, who is just constantly posing a lot of maybes: ‘Maybe if I had done this differently, this wouldn’t have happened.’ In the course of all these maybes, the characters sort of spilled out from there.

“The worst thing that can happen is you could lose a child, or the child could become something you don’t recognize. But while the book is gothic in nature, its chapters are often fun and offer some unexpected moments that I hope bring plenty of intrigue and light with the darkness.”

Tuck, who taught in the English department at ECU from 2008-2012 and now teaches writing at Wayne Community College, received the 2024 James Alan McPherson prize for the novel by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Twinless Twin was published last October.

“I mostly wrote short fiction for many years, and that was a genre I was comfortable in,” Tuck said. “That lends itself very naturally to most people, because we tell stories to each other all the time. I found the idea of writing a novel to be very intimidating. But after I’d written this one story and landed that story in a nice publication (EPOCH at Cornell University), … it charged me up and made me feel capable of being able to tackle a larger project.”

Tuck lives with his wife and two daughters in Bailey, where he grew up working tobacco fields. His latest project is a book of poetry. Keep up with him and read the first chapter of Twinless Twin at Dean Marshall Tuck’s website.