Doppelgänger

A hilarious, scathing, and absurdist critique of contemporary culture set in a fictional university town in the near future where a contagious “twinning” trend has swept across the student body

At Northwick Author Development Academy, an elite incubator for the creative class, originality is both fetish and mandate. Its candidates arrive ravenous for distinction—only to discover, after a year of carefully engineered “disorientation,” that their work has converged into something eerily uniform. 

When a student in the sophomore cohort, Carl Sample, announces his intention to provoke a stranger into punching him—an act pitched as both personal exorcism and artistic experiment—the action seems grotesque, comic, and vaguely prophetic. Before Carl can enact his plan, another student is assaulted in town. This emerging crisis of coincidence binds the cohort in a tightening web of surveillance and mythmaking, as intention and event fall fatally out of sync. Watched constantly by the Academy’s hidden media unit, the students begin to resemble copies of one another—twinned in fear, ambition, and aesthetic drift.

Doppelgänger is fiction at its most clever, most engaging, and most self-reflective. The reader embarks on a quest with an uncertain outcome, and Riviere keeps us on our toes throughout with his wit, his stylistic brilliance, and his matchless mind. Is this a scathing critique of contemporary culture or a virtuoso game of cat and mouse? Who’s to say? A bit of both, probably.