Thomas Tessier’s FINISHING TOUCHES came out nearly 20 years ago, but has just been reissued in paperback as part of Leisure’s horror line. And it definitely fits there.
Tom Sutherland is a young American doctor vacationing in London, where he meets Dr. Nordhagen, a kindly old plastic surgeon who quickly becomes his heavy drinking buddy, frequenting expensive and exclusive haunts all over town, night after night. Tom likes the guy, but he loves the doc’s assistant, the comely Lina, with whom Tom enjoys hot ‘n’ heavy humping, night after night. Life is good.
Until one evening when Lina gives her new lover a gift that is both sexual and violent – pushing the definitions of each – and Tom’s world is turned topsy-turvy. Complicating matters is his acceptance of a job offered by Nordhagen, a position that entails a cellar full of … well, that would spoil the surprise. Let’s just say it involves the promised unspeakable horrors.
Tessier’s TOUCHES is a disturbing work and not a predictable one. It will keep you reading, even if the third act is quite anticlimactic and the ending an illogical jumble. The first-person narrative is unremarkable, but that just makes the twists all the more shocking. And the man clearly knows how to write a sex scene, as demonstrated every few pages.
That alone would make this enough to recommend, but Leisure has gone one further by including a bonus novella, the 110ish-page FATHER PANIC’S OPERA MACABRE, which Tessier wrote in 2001. Thematically, it is the incestuous brother to TOUCHES: man in strange land gets lured into world of terror via sexy woman’s vagina. More specifically, it involves Neil, a writer on holiday in Italy whose car breaks down in an isolated area, near a tiled home that houses a creepy dwarf woman; a beautiful, ever-horny lass; and acts of brutality so depraved that TOUCHES looks tame by comparison.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }