Thomas Tessier
Tessier's next book was The Nightwalker (1979), the brief, terse story of a young American Vietnam veteran adrift in London who seems possessed by an uncontrollable urge to inflict mutilation and death and may, in fact, be a werewolf.In Shockwaves (1982), a young woman achieves an ambition out of romantic fiction when an up-and-coming lawyer asks her to marry him; but her life is overshadowed by the presence of an apparently supernatural murderer known only as The Blade.Phantom (1982) deals with a young boy's confrontations with death, starting with his mother's dangerous asthma attack and ending with a disturbing vision of the afterlife.Besides works of supernatural horror, Tessier has also written non-supernatural stories such as Rapture (1987), about a psychopathic stalker, and Secret Strangers (1990), about a teenage girl whose father's sudden disappearance prompts her to an amoral rebellion which leads to the discovery of a suburban child abuse ring.Tessier's other novels include Finishing Touches (1986), about a young doctor (again, an American alone in London) drawn into the sadistic world of a megalomaniac plastic surgeon; Fog Heart (1997), about the involvement of two married couples with a suicidal young medium; and Father Panic's Opera Macabre (2001), in which a writer of bland historical fiction is suddenly confronted with the atrocities which occurred in Croatia during the Second World War.