PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksThe world of this novel is both brilliantly strange and gnawingly familiar, though it resembles a dream more than it does our reality. Davis has created a place wherein the boundaries between two people are as flexible as a hinge and as thin as the walls of a duplex, a place where human beings live alongside robots and sorcerers ... Power, soulfulness, desire: weighty themes, and in the hands of a lesser writer Duplex could feel overbearing. But Davis explores each character with democracy, compassion and subtlety ... Davis plays brilliantly on the claustrophobia of American suburbia, and the duplex houses in Mary and Eddie’s neighborhood serve as an ideal site to explore the proximity that both separates and interweaves their occupants ... The novel gives us plenty of titillating whats, but few whys or hows. Though the dynamics between species are described early, I hoped to see them evolve more than they did ... But concrete meaning clearly isn’t what Duplex is after ... Duplex exists in the spaces between, and readers who don’t mind gray areas will very likely enjoy their stay.
