By THOMAS TESSIER (St. Martin’s Press; 1998)
For years I’ve enthusiastically kept up with the horror novels of Thomas Tessier, even though a). He’s an extremely unprolific author whose his last book was published in 2013, b). His most recent novels FATHER PANIC’S OPERA MACBRE and WICKED THINGS have let me down, and c). Nobody else on the planet seems to know about him.
Sadly, that last point has apparently remained constant after the 1998 publication of FOG HEART, even though it won at least one prestigious award and is in my view one of Tessier’s best books—perhaps even the best. The story pivots on Oona, a young Connecticut based psychic who functions as a spin-off of the spiritually inclined “Miss Tanith” from Tessier’s 1979 novel THE NIGHTWALKER (in which she’s described thusly: “He had expected a plump old hen…a matronly reader of tea leaves. Instead, he found a girl who might still be in school”).
Oona, who upends the lives of two affluent couples touched by supernatural phenomena, turns out to have an extremely shady past. Shady backgrounds, in fact, afflict just about every character, including the globe-trotting businessman Oliver, a mass murderer whose wife Carrie has been seeing the ghost of her deceased father, and the rootless academic Charley, who’s screwing around on his wife Jan, a “Poor fragile” thing debilitated by the loss of their infant daughter Fiona—who nonetheless has a quite a bit to say these days. This all leads to a series of uncanny events as the unhinged Oona telepathically delves into everyone’s lives, with horrific consequences for them and her.
FOG HEART’s narrative is rich and complex, enhanced by Tessier’s superbly economic prose and sharp eye for character detail. Oona, who functions as both pro and antagonist, is a particularly fascinating personage who’s tragic and loveable yet still deeply menacing. The psychic business, for its part, is extremely well handled; Tessier’s authorial conviction is such that I actually bought into his more extravagant claims, but still picked up on the vibe that everyone involved herein may have been seduced by a madwoman.