In Love and Horror
The Leisure paperback edition of my novel RAPTURE will be available in stores on Tuesday, August 1. Here is the text of a short piece I wrote for the Dorchester Publishing website about the book.
Thomas Tessier
Some of the most terrifying creatures in horror fiction (and movies) are not vampires, ghosts, werewolves or flesh-eating zombies. They are people, ordinary people who have families, friends, interests and occupations. And they’re in love, or at least they think they are – which is pretty much the same thing when it comes to what they feel and what they do.
I have long been a fan of the love-story-as-horror-story, whether it is about obsessive love taken to extremes, jealousy out of control, or the desire for revenge on the part of a spurned lover. In these stories our most powerful and explosive emotions are unleashed, and the results can be unpredictable, dangerous and often quite deadly.
Nathaniel Hawthorne loved to scour the newspapers for reports of stories like this, and today we can go online and find the same kind of accounts in the local section of papers from Providence to Seattle. I’m not talking about cases of pathological abuse or domestic violence, but the feverish nightmare tales of love gone wrong in real, apparently ordinary lives. Crimes of passion fascinate us so much because love is at the heart of them, and love can transform our lives utterly in an instant – for better or for worse. Sometimes, much worse.
In RAPTURE, I wrote about Jeff, a guy with a very successful career in the software industry, seemingly in control of himself and on top of everything in his life. But there’s an ocean of emptiness inside him. He becomes obsessed with an old friend from high school days, Georgianne. It doesn’t matter that she has a full life of her own, is happily married, a mother, and has no interest in anything more than casual friendship with him. In Jeff’s idealized vision of Georgianne, he and she were meant to be together. It still amazes me that a man like Jeff can be virtually helpless, enthralled and controlled by his obsession, and yet at the same time so powerful, like a force of nature, bringing upheaval and catastrophe upon himself and others.
Fiction can take us into the hearts and minds of such people with a feeling of intimacy that newspaper and television reports will never match. Most of us have had some experience of how great the disappointment, anger, pain and sense of hurt can be when love fails, how blind and unrealistic we become. And we all know that there is some invisible line, beyond which love can suddenly turn into horror. Fiction can remind us of that, and enable us to see and feel it all again from the inside – but in a way that grounds us in the truth and becomes a positive, enriching experience.
