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Post by sean on Jul 2, 2008 10:26:33 GMT
(...nothing to do with anthologies, but from what I've read of his work he belongs under the heading 'American Gothic'...) Anyone read much by this chap? I picked up 'Phantom' last week and whooshed through it like an amphetamine-fueled worm through an apple. I'm now going to track down his other work (eight or so novels and two short story collections) as all of it sounds pretty damn good. PhantomFirst published 1982 (Pan 1983) (It has a front cover with eyeholes cut in, so you can see bits of the illustration behind it... the inside picture is so good I thought it worth risking a little cover crease-age to scan it. Just a pity it came out all blotchy!) (cover illustration by Gary Blythe - can't tell if he was responsible for both or not) BLURB: 'Ned knew the phantoms very well... they came singly or as an army, in more shapes and forms that anyone could count. Unseen and untouched. But they came, they were there...'
Ned was only a kid, but he knew. There were forces that stalked the night.
Like that night in Washington when his mother almost died and he heard them. In the house, at dead of night he heard them.
Then they moved to the tiny seacoast town of Lynnington, he still knew, even there, something was coming after him.
In the end Ned must face the terror alone. He must seek out the phantoms on their own ground and fight them for his very soul. Through a long night of cataclysmic battle...
It's him up against them...
Another of those somewhat misleading blurbs publishers seem to love so much for horror novels that don't exactly fit the mould. Oh well... As far as I can tell (and there is every chance that I am misreading this) this is a novel about childhood fears of death, fears that are in this instance given the form of phantoms which, due to their very unreality, take very much a back seat in the story. But, like death itself, they are always there. Ned is five years old when his mother almost dies of a massive asthma attack. He is convinced that the phantoms are there, even as the ambulance medics turn up and wheel her into hospital, where she recovers. A few years down the line and the family of three move out of the big bad city into a little fishing town. Their house may (or may not) have a bit of a strange past about it, but like much in the book, it is mentioned in such a way that it may or may not be relevant. But there certainly is a spooky scarecrow overlooking the back of the house, which freaks Ned out so much that one day he takes a saw to it. He makes friends with two old codgers who run a fishing bait shop, one of whom doesn't make it to the end of the book... Some uneasy pages later, the confrontation with death / the phantoms comes amidst one of the strangest dream landscapes I have ever had the pleasure to read. If it is meant to be a vision of the afterlife, it certainly sounds like a f**k**g weird place to be! Here's a bit of it: The way aheard was a narrow path down the middle of a long street crammed full of tall, thin tubes that reared up about eight feet from the ground. They were blood red and they clicked against each other, sounding like plastic. Ned saw they were rooted to the black earth in dense clusters. As he and the woman entered the street, the tubes bristled, as if reacting to a static charge. They leaned and swayed like a field of nightmare corn in a wind [...] Suddenly he looked up. At the top of each tube a fist-sized head could be seen. Some of them protruded, while others lurked just inside the casing, or moved in and out. Ned felt dizzy and sick - the faces were almost human. Tiny, wizened, they looked piteously on the two people moving throught their midst. Their mouths moved silently and their eyes seemed to cry out with some unknowing meaning.
A seriously good book, it never goes in quite the direction you expect it to. I'm looking forward to getting my grubby mitts on Tessier's other stuff!
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Post by dem bones on Jul 2, 2008 16:35:19 GMT
I've read several of his short pieces but just the one novel, and he's a huge talent for sure. Yet another resurrected 'review' (sorry!), but it's climbing the 'to re-read' pile .... Thomas Tessier - The Nightwalker (Pan, 1980) Chris Moore Blurb For young America Bobby Ives, the horrors of Vietnam were far behind him. Here in London, life was civilized, secure, restful.
But still the dreams persisted. Hideous dreams.
Nightmares of a former life, of mutilation and carnage that gripped him in a vice of helpless terror and twisted his mentality out of all proportion ...
Against the garish background of contemporary London, Ives fights a losing battle with this weird, overpowering force – a force that would set him prowling the twilight open spaces of' Hyde Park in a frenzied quest for blood and the flesh of innocent humans ...
THE NIGHTWALKER
If you know London you'll wish you didn'tSet in London, around 1978, its the story of Bobby Ives, a troubled Viet-Vet who may or may not be a werewolf. He hooks up with some young punk rockers, attends a gig at the Roxy in Covent Garden (the Adverts and a band I can't quite identify are playing) and stalks Hyde Park by night in search of victims. The setting is painfully recognisable and despite the premise, its an intelligent, incredibly compact (158 pages) nasty. Maybe the best lycanthrope novel since Guy Endore's masterpiece. The tag-line to the Pan 1980 paperback reads in part; "If you know London, you'll wish you didn't." ************* RymerSounds excellent. This has been on my shelves for over a decade and for some reason I've never got round to it. Just sought it out, and shall now read. Cheers. ************* It's a fabulous novel. Perfectly evocative of its time and place (you could still get fish & chips wrapped in newspaper in London!) as well as being properly disturbing. I can only agree: it does deserve the greatest of accolades, to be mentioned in the same sentence as Guy Endore. Wonderful piece of work. Thanks for the recommendation. Incidentally, I'm sure you're right about it being the Adverts playing when our hero visits the Roxy. But that means we have to allow a little poetic licence: I think the band only played there in the first four or five months of 1977, which doesn't quite fit with the reference elsewhere in the text to the Son of Sam killings in the past tense.
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Post by sean on Jul 2, 2008 16:42:46 GMT
Cool, I gave the Adverts 'Live at the Roxy' a listen just last week!
Judging by the comments on 'The Nightwalker' and some odds and ends I've bumped into by googling the author, it looks like Tessier's style can best be described as 'ambiguous'!
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