The Halloween Countdown continues as Randy M. looks at Thomas Tessier’s The Nightwalker
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THE NIGHTWALKER by Thomas Tessier (Perennial, 1980; Leisure, 2008)
He had only been in Harrods twice before, but something about the place bothered him. Not the store itself, he decided, although he always felt he should be wearing a suit and tie when he set foot inside it and he hated wearing suits, but rather the shoppers. All these people moving about, busy, preoccupied and methodical, enjoying themselves spending money. Impulsive or discerning, it didn’t matter; as a group they radiated an air of confidence and self-assurance, as if this was a basic part of the larger cycle of their lives. They knew what they were doing, even the many tourists in their peculiar way. In the midst of them all, Ives felt like a random item in a building full of specifics.
If only I could send a message to the people of London: Hyde Park is mine, so stay out. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Without warning. Yes, that would be fantastic. Robert Ives, custodian. Keeper of the crypt. That’s what it was, Hyde Park, a vast crypt. How many dead lie here beneath the grass and footpaths? From the plagues, the fires, the hangings … centuries of dead. Count the skulls and bones, keeper. As many as died at Belsen, or more, in this, one of the most popular spots in London. These are my children. […]
Bobby Ives, veteran of Vietnam living in London on a military pension, is going insane. Maybe.
One morning smoke fills his apartment and the corridor outside; another lodger has almost set fire to the building. Ives finds the burning pot on the man’s stove just in time then barely stops himself from beating the man to death. Ives doesn’tknow why he flew into a rage or how to stop it.
Ives’ apartment house sits near Hyde Park. When not in his room, he wanders the Park, at home there and feelingconnection to the park and something like serenity along its paths and in its woods. Once, while meandering in the park, he had blacked out or, what he truly believes, experienced a revelation of having lived previously, a life on an island calledGuadeloupe where a brother he doesn’t remember had just died and left him a plantation. Life there was good until thenight he was killed.
Ives suspects that Guadeloupe was not his only previous life, and it certainly was not his first brush with death. While inVietnam he had nearly died at the hands of a girl who had just killed another soldier. Now he wonders if Vietnam and Guadeloupe were just sites along a journey toward a self-rationalizing satisfaction in death and blood. Can he control it or will it control him?
Essentially a character study, The Nightwalker scrutinizes the conscience of Bobby Ives as he struggles to keep from dissolving before the strength and desires of another Bobby Ives. He is unwilling to believe in his girlfriend’s rational thoughts about or her doctor’s medical explanations of what he is experiencing; they do not fully explain the force he feelsemerging from within himself and instead relies on a psychic, Miss Tanith, who recognizes his struggle.
In the afterward to the Leisure edition, Tessier recalls that at the time of writing he only knew of two books withlycanthrope as the subject, Jack Williamson’s Darker than You Think and Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris. Taken by Endore’s psychological approach, he explores the life of Bobby Ives, noting experiences that form him, his glory in his power and the after-effects on Bobby physically and mentally, never quite committing to a supernatural explanationthough suggesting that the supernatural cannot be discounted.
Introducing the Leisure edition, Jack Ketchum likens Miss Tanith to the old gypsy woman in the Universal Wolfman moviesof the 1940s. There are other parallels as well in Bobby’s guilt, his fight to subdue the animal that seems to be taking him over, and the threat he poses to his loved ones. Bobby Ives is as pathetic as Laurence Talbot from those movies and just as dangerous. While not as taken with this novel as I was with Tessier’s Finishing Touches, I’m still impressed by Tessier’smastery at depicting a man’s gradual slide into decadence and evil. His prose is pared and exact, incantatory when appropriate, and at times lyrical.
Note that there is some graphically described violence in the novel but for a dark read in October, you can hardly do better than this.
Where wolves?
“The Revel” by John Langan (also found in, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky, 2012)
“Boobs” by Suzy McKee Charnas (also found in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantoms, 2004)
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
