Thomas Tessier’s placid prose lured readers out on the ice, which then cracked, plunging them into a nightmare abyss where alcoholic plastic surgeons babbled about the Marquis de Sade to living human torsos shorn of limbs and locked in cages. One of the few horror novelists to spin his fear out of adult sexual relationships, rather than slopping sex on top of his stories like a mountain of Reddi-wip, Tessier’s books feel more mature, and therefore much darker, than a lot of what was on the market.
