NightWriter

The January 2002 issue of Fangoria magazine included an article/interview with me about my writing.  It is now posted here in the Albums section, on the right side of this page.  Repeat click to enlarge the Fangoria pages.

Last year I wrote an Introduction to Lisa Tuttle’s fine novella, “My Death,” which is available in both hardcover and paperback.

For more information: http://pspublishing.co.uk/cat/md.asp

Lisa is one of our best writers, but her work doesn’t seem to receive the attention and appreciation it deserves.  Here is what I wrote.

INTRODUCTION:

MY DEATH by Lisa Tuttle

Thomas Tessier

    Lisa Tuttle can write anything she wants to write and it will always be worth reading.  She has written non-fiction and some novels that are marketed for young adult readers, but she has distinguished herself most notably in the genres of science fiction and horror.  The terms dark fantasy and suspense have also been used to describe some of her work, but fiction categories are limiting at best, and in Tuttle’s case largely irrelevant to what is really going on between the covers.  Nor can a label give any hint of the richness and deep power of what she does with words or of the evolution of her talent over the years.  I don’t think she has ever met a literary convention she couldn’t subvert or arrived at a genre boundary that she couldn’t push, stretch, twist or blur –to the point where we finally realize the error and futility of our own preconceptions.    
    Her books are not always as widely and easily available as they should be and she is not an author who pushes herself on the reading public, so before I get to the splendid new novella at hand, I want to take a moment to celebrate a few of my own favorites from the body of fine, haunting stories that she has already given us.
    If guilt is the dark engine at work in much of Hawthorne’s best fiction, loss is the driving force in Tuttle’s.  It may be the loss of love that occurs when a relationship fractures and ends, as in Familiar Spirit, or the loss of a loved one to death, as in Gabriel.  In both of these novels Tuttle explores the many ways in which our lives change and are changed forever — often nightmarishly — in the wake of loss.  She does so with an uncompromising moral integrity, never flinching from the worst that people can do to others and themselves, but also with an implicit sense of emotional compassion that elevates her writing far above standard genre fare.
    Loss is also a crucial factor in two brilliant novels that followed.  For Clare, in Lost Futures, reality is treacherous at every turn, every turn seems pivotal and her sense of her own identity is disappearing in a furious psychic whirlwind.  This wrenching dance with breakdown, or invasion, is existential terror of the first order, swift and unrelenting, but also written with emotional weight and resonance.  It is exactly what some of us crave.
    Loss assumes the guise of its corrosive doppelganger, absence, in The Pillow Friend.  The young Agnes Grey, not unlike Anne Bronte’s heroine of the same name, is shaped as much by what is absent from her life — the love and affection of a real mother, a stimulating environment, a friend, a lover — as she is by the banal realities of her everyday existence.  Bronte’s Agnes emerged from her ordeals and enjoyed love, marriage and motherhood, but life is not so tidy and rewarding in Tuttle’s world.  Even when you get what you want, it usually turns out to be something different or comes at a terrible price.  Her Agnes also wants more, she wants a full, rich, real life, but she seeks it by flying off into the world of dreams and fantasies — and indeed, where better to find one’s own true self, and destiny?  
    The Bronte link is fine, there are Brontean elements and touches to be found elsewhere in Tuttle’s work, and escape into unreality is itself a key part of the entire Bronte family saga.  But I think The Pillow Friend shares a much deeper affinity with Shirley Jackson’s superb novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and deserves to stand beside it.  To me,  Jackson is still the gold standard for post-WWII writers when it comes to uncovering the horror in our everyday lives, capturing the loneliness of the human heart and understanding how the two fatefully intersect.  Patricia Highsmith comes close, but lacks the capacity for tenderness Jackson has.  Lisa Tuttle has it too.    
    The Pillow Friend is entrancing.  At times it lulls you into a nervous complaisance you know cannot last, and then it will twist and kick you in the gut and change your whole perspective.  Like Lost Futures, it is an ambitious novel, the work of an author stretching her reach stylistically, structurally and emotionally, and reaching the ambitious goals she set for herself.      
    In these four core novels and in her short stories, Tuttle introduces us to characters who are so convincing and conflicted that we feel we know them intimately and are ensnared in the same darkness and fear that possess them.  But it is a very edgy intimacy.  Like the best of writers, she will portray but not judge her characters, sometimes leaving us to squirm uncomfortably with a gnawing sense of our own complicity in the unbearable situations they face and choices they make.
    For those of us who cherish short fiction, Tuttle’s work is a treasure trove, a vast and fearful  kingdom in itself.  I think the first piece of hers I ever read was “Sun City,” published in Ramsey Campbell’s anthology New Terrors, and it has stayed with me ever since.  Hers is one of the few names I always look for hopefully in new magazines and anthologies.  A Nest of Nightmares and Ghosts and Other Lovers are cornerstone collections.  
    Every reader will have his or her own favorites, but let me cite just one of mine.  “My Pathology” is the title story of an e-book collection readily available online at a price so modest it seems like theft, for all that is gained in return.  It is some kind of diabolical masterpiece, straining credibility more and more with each passing page, yet utterly convincing and inescapable, a tale of obsessions and alchemy, babies, self-abasement, disease and the unbearable nightmare that love can become.  “My Pathology” is a tour de force and it ends with a stabbing last line that is one of the finest ever written in the literature of horror.
    Now, to My Death.  Well, if you’re here, you know why you’re here, so let me just tell you that you will meet two (I think) women, each ghosted with loss.  There is a painting I’d like to have on the wall here in my office, for all the moments when I need something special to stare at.  You may catch a hint of The Aspern Papers, an echo of Arthur Machen and M.R. James, all genial nods from a worthy heiress to some of her ghostly forebears.  But this tale is entirely Lisa Tuttle’s.  Park any preconceptions you may still have on the street and do step inside.

copyright (c) 2004 by Thomas Tessier

The new paperback edition of my novel FINISHING TOUCHES was published in August by Leisure Books and is available in bookstores and online.  The volume also includes my novella, “Father Panic’s Opera Macabre.” 

I put down some thoughts on both of these stories and horror literature in general, which you can read at http://dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/SpecialFeatures.cfm?ID=1971

Bill Sheehan, the author of AT THE FOOT OF THE STORY TREE and a book reviewer for The Washington Post and other publications, chose FINISHING TOUCHES as the subject of his critical piece in HORROR: ANOTHER 100 BEST BOOKS, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman and with a Foreword by Peter Straub, to be published Fall 2005 by Carroll & Graf.  I’ve been fortunate to have more good reviews than bad, over the years, but this is by far the best, most perceptive look at any of my novels.   More details at http://carrollandgraf.com

     “It’s astonishing what some women will put up with just to have a warm body.”
                — Judith Rossner, Washington Post interview, 1983

The trade edition of CINEMA MACABRE, edited by Mark Morris, is due to be released by PS Publishing any day now.  The deluxe edition, signed by all of the contributors, will be available before the end of the year.  CINEMA MACABRE includes contributions from about 50 science fiction, horror or fantasy authors, each writing about one of his/her favorite movies. 

My piece is on PRETTY POISON (1968), starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, which was based on the novel SHE LET HIM CONTINUE by Stephen Geller.  The movie was set in Massachusetts, but in the book, the story takes place here in the Naugatuck Valley.

More information:http://pspublishing.co.uk

I will be taking part in the Borderlands Press Bootcamp in Baltimore, January 20-22, 2006. The Bootcamp is a weekend workshop for new and developing writers, and I will be working with this year’s class on the issues of character and point of view in the novel.

Other participating authors include Jack Ketchum, Thomas F. Monteleone, David Morrell, F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Massie and Douglas E. Winter.

More information on the Bootcamp and Borderlands books: http://borderlandspress.com

Check out and enjoy Carl W. Lawson’s wonderful art at http://cwlawson.com

Carl and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Naugatuck, CT.  In our high school years we worked together at the Finast supermarket on Church Street.  He had a VW bug, and he could put it through a full 360 slide going down Field Street in the snow.

My favorite painting on Carl’s website is the one of the Frontier Cafe in Beacon Falls.  I used to stop in there three or four times a year with my brothers, Bob, Ken and Alan.  The owner, Lenny Dorosh, was a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, and his bar was a shrine to the team, full of Red Sox memorabilia.  It was a great place to have a beer and talk baseball, it felt like an extension of Lenny’s living room (like many pub landlords in Ireland and England, he lived upstairs).  The last time we went there was a few days after Christmas, 2003.  A few weeks later, Lenny died at the age of 73, about nine months short of seeing the Red Sox win the World Series for the first time in his life.

The Frontier Cafe has been closed ever since.  Even if it does eventually re-open, it will certainly be changed, very different.  I’m so glad Carl caught it forever.

     “It’s not possible to be wise and in love at the same time.”
          — Bob Dylan, in the Scorsese documentary NO DIRECTION HOME