Goodbye, Thomas Tessier

Once again I have Stephen King to thank. One of the many recommendations in his nonfiction study of horror, Danse Macabre, was Thomas Tessier’s The Nightwalker.

I was so lucky and it was such a great time to be a horror reader back in 1983. There was a little used bookstore called The Bookworm just up the road. They used to be everywhere and the owners sold the books at half price. Unlike today, you could find almost anything you wanted to read.

I found them all. The Doll Who Ate His Mother, Ghost Story, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The House Next Door, The Dark Country, Psycho, The Keep, Night Things, The Rats and The Fog and all the other early James Herbert books. Fevre Dream. The Fury. The Manitou. The Haunting of Hill House. All for a couple of dollars each. Wouldn't I like to find those deals today.

The Nightwalker, by Thomas Tessier, was one of the best. It was and it always will be. Tessier was one of the few, the very few, genre writers in the same league as Peter Straub.

Phantom came next, then The Fates. Both are phenomenal.

I bought one Tessier that didn’t look particularly promising. The book was called Shock Waves and it was part of a short-lived book line called Night Shades: The Darker Side of Love.

Maybe it was one of those right-time, right-place things. Shock Waves hit me in all the right spots. I was arrested by the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage while the shadow of a serial killer cast darkness over her life. It’s one of my favorite books to this day.

I wrote about Shock Waves a decade or so ago, and I was startled to find a message from Thomas Tessier in my inbox. He was duly appreciative, but a little surprised. He said Shock Waves was conceived by the publisher and it was the only work-for-hire novel he ever did.

Tessier came off in that email as kind and humorous. I’m grateful I had that brief encounter with the man.

I read Finishing Touches in 1986. I always thought the novel was ahead of its time. It would have been right at home in the Del/Abyss line of transgressive horror books from the nineties.

I read them all. Rapture, Secret Strangers, Fogheart, Father Panic’s Opera Macabre, Wicked Things. If I ever had a problem with Thomas Tessier, it was that I wished he had been more prolific. He wasn’t like some under thirty indie author with fifty books under his belt. Tessier’s brand of horror obviously took time to craft.

I always held out hope that we’d see another Thomas Tessier novel. I guess that isn’t going to happen. I suppose a trunk novel could be unearthed, but we’d probably be better off without it.

Without a doubt, Thomas Tessier was one of the best we’ve ever had in the horror genre. He was largely unknown to the masses, but thanks to reprints from Leisure Books and Valancourt, people can easily discover his work. The old editions are rather costly.

It’s depressing. Who do we have left? I’m talking about the one I began reading when I fell in love with the horror genre. We’ve already said goodbye to so many. John Farris, F. Paul Wilson, Thomas F. Monteloene, and Clive Barker are still among the living, but don’t seem to write anymore.

I’m grateful we have Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, John Skipp, and Robert McCammon, still at it, still bringing us the best in the business.

Stephen King is still with us, and he is still writing great fiction. We all owe him the world.

Written by Mark Sieber