Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer living in eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughters. His work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. Tuck serves on the advisory board for the North Carolina Literary Review and teaches writing at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina. His most recent book is Twinless Twin: A Novel (Nebraska, 2025), winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel.
I’m reluctant to speak for Gen-Xers as I missed the cut off by a year (b. 1981) (and they probably don’t like spokesmen either), but regardless of where the generation line is drawn, I feel that I can certifiably say that people my age are unanimously still creeped out by the Unsolved Mysteries television show theme music. Cue Robert Stack in trench coat, dimly lit setting, and that husky-voiced introduction, and we’re a bit paralyzed, at least long enough to learn what three or four unsolved cases are coming our way.
Unlike the grainy video quality of those reruns, my memory of lying on the floor of my grandparents’ living room on Wednesday nights (somehow missing the evening service—to “do homework”?) is crystal clear as is the palpable fear, or at least deeply unsettled-ness resulting less from criminals doing what they do, and more from alien abductions, hauntings, and legends like lake monsters, yeti, and Mothman. Back then, I suspect I missed the opening disclaimer that the show was not a news program. In those days, at that age, if it was on television, it was true. Therefore, you grow up not with the “feeling” that this world is strange and unknowable, but rather with an absolute certainty that this is the case.
Twenty years later, I would find myself newly married and living in my grandparents’ house, sitting on their back porch sunroom, watching Unsolved Mysteries reruns morning after morning on Lifetime. Fun fact—my wife calls it “Spooky Loose Ends.” You just love some spooky loose ends, she’d say. It’s true. I’ve always liked stories that were a little dark, a lot weird, and that have open endings. I like the notion that the story lives on, that somewhere everyone’s still doing their thing, and even if I’m stuck on the weekend grading Freshman comp. papers, somewhere out there, something fantastic is happening, changing someone’s life forever.
One such morning I happened upon a UM segment about the “twinless twin.” This phenomenon refers to a twin who has lost their twin sibling. According to the segment, in cases where twins are lost in utero or shortly thereafter, some of these surviving twins, despite growing up with no knowledge of their missing twin, find themselves living their lives with a vague sense of grief or loss; some of the survivors feel guilt; and on the other end of the spectrum, some report feeling as though they have a guardian angel guiding and looking after them. Others feel compelled to live fast and hard, in a sense, living two lives in one, which the segment of that episode implies is the case with the world’s most famous twinless twin, Elvis Presley, whose brother Garon preceded him in death.
I can’t say if there’s anything to this whole twinless twin phenomenon since I’m not one, but I can say that it was moving to see in the interviews how these surviving twins each assembled meaning in their own way from learning later in life they’d had a twin they never knew—like this fact of their biography helped them to make sense of something about themselves they could never quite understand, something they always felt to be true but couldn’t articulate.
That summer, I wrote a story called “Twinless Twin” about a mother who dearly wishes to understand her son, a twinless twin, whose life has been haunted by the loss of a brother shortly after his birth. In the story, we learn that the boy, later in life, is at the center of some unspeakable tragedy that his mother only obliquely alludes to—it pains her too deeply to approach it head on; similarly, she refuses to even speak the name of her living son.
This story was published by Epoch the next year. I continued to work with longer short stories in the coming years, but the world of that story and its characters kept calling me. Several years later, I planned and wrote the novel Twinless Twin, and in 2024, I had the good fortune of winning the Association of Writers and Writing Program’s novel prize. Judge and fellow North Carolinian Jason Mott selected the book among several hundred entrants, and I’m glad to say, the book has a home in University of Nebraska Press.
In my novel, the twinless twin character is largely absent, yet, at the same time, omnipresent in the lives of his family. The book centers on his parents and little sister, showing how their son/brother’s actions have become their own “spooky loose end” seemingly guiding or orienting their life despite his absence. Largely set in the foothills of an unnamed mountain, this insular landscape breeds rumor, legend, daydreams, and a mystery that runs deeper than the family who inhabits its woods. The book raises questions regarding culpability in the face of tragedy, and questions regarding the responsibilities of those who remain once the family has been splintered.
Of course, there are literary influences as well. I feel indebted to many twentieth century writers like NC’s own Thomas Wolfe, speculative and weird writers like Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson, and J. D. Salinger. I was very influenced by Salinger’s Glass family stories—how in that family of precocious siblings, older brother Seymour executes such influence on everyone’s lives. Though we only receive details of Seymour second hand from brother and family historian Buddy Glass, you can’t help but be enamored with Seymour, due in part to his particular tragedy. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” Buddy writes a lengthy introduction meant to precede a book of Seymour’s haiku. I just love the extra layer of fiction there, and the notion that there exists somewhere a book of haiku written by Seymour that we might stumble upon one lazy day in the used book store of a city we’re only passing through. I love that we only have these artifacts and family lore from which to assemble who we believe Seymour to be. I love that ultimately, Seymour remains unknowable.
And so, my book is a weird one and collects all the weird loves of my life in true Bradbury form—he took this same approach to his first collection later titled The October Country. Twinless Twin is my very own Twin Peaks, a place where I can go and mull over life’s mysteries, where characters look to their family members and within their own hearts to find mysteries there just as deep and dark as those surrounding them in the Appalachian wilderness. I hope that my novel, with its tangent glimpses of a twinless twin, achieved by following the lives of his family, offers the reader something familiar in its strangeness, reflecting our own uncertain lives in this way, in all our melancholy and wonder and glorious mystery.
For more about Twinless Twin and to read recent works of short fiction and poetry from the writer, please visit www.deanmarshalltuck.com.
UNP blog 