The best books about living and dying in the shadow of our own invented selves

My professional background's in magic, so Houdini's an endlessly fascinating character to me—both in his real life and the grand illusion he built of himself as the early 20th century's greatest showman. Erik Weisz was a skilled performer with a passion for physically testing himself. Harry Houdini, by contrast, was a superhuman master mystifier, a tireless crusader against psychic fraudsters—and also, allegedly, a rather successful spy. What emerges in this book is a man at war with his own constructed alter ego. A man who literally escaped his own grave many times before falling victim to the very claims of invincibility that established his legend, and who ultimately died believing himself a fraud. It's an immensely powerful story to me, inspirational and chilling in equal measure. 

I instinctively gravitate toward characters stricken with identity issues. It's one of the reasons I've spent years specialising in writing comics, where alternate personae and false realities are fundamental storytelling tools. Growing up, I first read the story of Robinson in a conjuring book, and it caught my imagination fiercely. Like Houdini, Robinson's commitment to maintaining his performance identity was full-blooded—to the point that the myths surrounding his death have virtually swallowed the story of his life. Steinmeyer navigates a complex tale of dual identities with the ease of a seasoned magician. Chung Ling Soo, one of the world's greatest vaudeville stars, died on stage in 1918 when a bullet catch trick went tragically wrong. William Robinson, however, had been fading away for many years by then.

Fight club is a chainsaw-dissection of the concept of 90s masculinity, a nihilistic poem of self-destruction set against a violently consumerist backdrop. Crucially for me, it's essentially a story of warring identities. All of the narrator's fiercest, most intense struggles are against himself—or a version of himself he creates as a brutal critique of his own shortcomings and flawed ambitions. The film adaptation is occasionally misused to prop up some very dodgy politics, and I haven't quite forgiven Palahniuk for accidentally putting the term "snowflake" into popular use as an insult, but Fight Club is still a savagely powerful depiction of a character undergoing a crisis of identities.

As a model unreliable narrator, you couldn't pick a more disarming armed robber than Mark "Chopper" Read. He described his pseudo-autobiographical book series as "the truth, the half-truth and nothing like the truth," which may be the most honest statement he ever made. None of this is to suggest that Read wasn't every inch the ultra-violent toecutter he sketches out in his writing. It's just that every word in Chopper is working toward the same goal: building a larger-than-life self-caricature to outshine and outlast the man himself. The cover quote boldly declares, "I regret nothing." The final line of the book admits, "I regret everything." Chopper Read lived and died within that contradiction, and his story's all the more mesmerising for its gunsmoke and mirrors.

This book, for me, stands alongside The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a necessary stepping stone toward all modern 'dark double' fiction. I actually first encountered the book via one of its looser adaptations, The Man Who Haunted Himself, starring Roger Moore. I must have seen that some time in the 70s, and it stuck with me across five decades without losing its core power. The Armstrong original, written in 1940 then expanded later, is still a legitimately creepy tale, particularly in terms of the questions it refuses to answer. Watching Pelham's slow-motion collapse into paranoia and chaos is a genuinely uneasy experience, like seeing The Picture of Dorian Gray through the eyes of the portrait itself.