Frank Jude's Reviews > Rapture

I am a big fan of the horror genre, and whether in film or literature, the most horrifying tales have nothing to do with the supernatural. As I write this review, the film Speak No Evil is screening in theaters and it is an agonizing slow burn of psychological horror, more horrifying because you know such a situation is completely possible and perhaps even plausible. Thomas Tessier's Rapture is one of the more horrifying and horrifyingly "true to life" tales of psychopathy I have ever read.

Tessier masterfully gives us insight into his protagonist's mind as he twists all that happens to his preferences and how he turns all evidence of failure into a new realization of his deep insight. You see the twistedness and you feel the tightening in your stomach just knowing it ain't going to lead to anything good. Jeff, the tech-bro psycho reunites with a High School crush and the happily married Georgianne makes an innocuous comment when asked by her husband why she and Jeff never dated in High School saying that if Jeff had asked she would have gone out with him. And as Grady Hendrix points out in his Introduction, "And right there, on page fifty-two of a two-hundred-and-forty-seven page book, she's sealed her fate." And like a Greek tragedy, all the stalking, the murdering and depravity unfolds from that one moment.

I don't know how I missed out on the work of Thomas Tessier, but I've already got several more of his books on my "To Read" shelf. I'd say that the writer he most reminds me of is Jim Thompson, especially the Thompson of The Killer Inside Me or A Hell of a Woman, as well as his professed "model", the masterful author of the first person psychopath novel: Patricia Highsmith. The big difference is that we uncomfortably find ourselves rooting for Highsmith's Tom Ripley while we are kept looking on in horror as Jeff moves inexorably toward doom.