Newly reissued, Thomas Tessier’s RAPTURE is your basic boy-meets-girl story … albeit one where the guy goes totally, completely, plausibly nuts.

Jeff is a fairly well-off enterpreneur who makes his living in computers in Los Angeles. When he gets the bad news that his father has died, he jets back home east and wonders whatever happened to Georgianne, that hot girl he had such a crush on in high school. Though they were close friends, their relationship was strictly platonic. Now divorced, Jeff thinks he’d like to find out, so he does some simple investigating and discovers that she lives close enough to their old hometown that he can “stop by.”

So he does, with no forewarning, and finds she’s still gorgeous. Oh, and very married. But she has an 18-year-old hot daughter, which slightly mitigates the husband problem. But something in Jeff snaps, and he believes only he can – and will – have Georgianne, even if that means getting rid of the others in her life. Let the lunacy commence! And let it involve cocaine, prostitution and other deviant acts.

With references to jogging and Duran Duran, RAPTURE’s 1987 original publication date shows, but that’s not a strike against the novel, as it fits squarely into the “I like yer wife” sicko-psychothriller genre so popular in the culture of that era. Its disturbing qualities, however, are timeless; no matter what decade you read this in, it will bother you. Jeff is not the least bit sympathetic – nor he is meant to be – from the start, and with every page, your hatred for him grows. The more deranged he gets, the more dangerous Tessier’s book becomes, and that’s a good thing.

It’s designed to make you uncomfortable, to bother you, to make you feel a need to shower when it’s all over. If it weren’t well-written, it would do none of the above. Tessier took a great risk in making his protagonist the despicable one, but somehow he pulled it off; perhaps it’s because we don’t quite know what Jeff has in mind, yet we want to see him eventually pay for whatever it is. The horror in this one stems from the fact that it could happen in real life, and sadly has, many times over. –Rod Lott

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