Dr. James Hardcastle is resting from an illness
in the countryside when he hears rumors of a leg-
endary creature that lives in Blue John Gap. The
gap is an old Roman mine where they excavated
Blue John, a valuable mineral, but which has been
abandoned for centuries and is now shunned by
the locals, who believe it is the home of a monster
that steals their sheep at night. Hardcastle is skep-
tical but intrigued by a strange sound he hears
from the shaft, and in due course he secures can-
dles and matches in order to explore the tunnels.
Unfortunately, he slips and falls into a stream of
water during his first expedition and finds himself
sitting in the dark with wet matches and no idea
how to return to the surface. His only hope seems
to be to dry the matches, but while trying to do so
he becomes aware that he is no longer alone, that
some large animal has come down to drink.
Hardcastle escapes injury and later manages
to light his candle and climb out of the mine, but
he fails in his efforts to convince the authorities
that there really is something preying on sheep
and, unfortunately, at least one local man. Deter-
mined to end the menace, he secures a rifle and
more reliable lighting and returns, surprising and
wounding the creature, although he himself is seri-
ously injured and rendered unconscious in the pro-
cess. When he recovers he has been rescued by the
villagers, who have also used massive stones to
block the shaft of the mine so that the creature
can never again venture out onto the surface. The
reader might justifiably wonder why they had not
taken these steps earlier.
The monster story is a major part of horror fic-
tion, usually supernatural, sometimes rationalized,
and sometimes just mysterious. Doyle makes a per-
functory effort to justify his creature as the denizen
of an underground cave system, even describing it
as completely blind, but the story is not dependent
on a scientific explanation. Surprisingly, although
this is one of Doyle’s very best non-Holmes stories,
it is rarely reprinted.
Tessier, Thomas(1947– )
Thomas Tessier’s first novel, The Fates(1978), is
an unusual and maddeningly uneven horror novel
in which the danger originates with a mysterious
force or entity that quite literally rips its victims
apart. Although it is finally driven into inactivity,
it is neither destroyed nor positively identified, an
ending somewhat too ambiguous for many readers.
It also involves a surprisingly large cast of charac-
ters for such a short novel, none of whom are very
deeply developed. His second effort, The Night-
walker(1979), takes a very different approach, de-
scribing the protagonist’s slow descent into
insanity and homicidal fury in great detail and es-
tablishing Bobby as a vivid though repulsive char-
acter. The fantastic content is quite limited this
time and equally nontraditional. Bobby may be
succumbing to a supernatural force and turning
into an inhuman monster, although we never
learn that for certain, but since one of the other
characters is a genuine clairvoyant, the premise of
the story certainly allows for either interpretation.
Phantom(1982) is far more conventional. A
young boy explores an abandoned building that is
home to restless and sometimes angry spirits. The
novel is a quiet, modernized ghost story that de-
rives most of its impact from descriptions of the
boy’s reactions to what he discovers and his grow-
ing isolation from the world of the living. Most of
Tessier’s fiction from that point forward consists of
nonsupernatural thrillers, but he returned to fan-
tastic horror with Fog Heart(1997), one of the best
horror novels of the 1990s. The story involves two
sisters, one of whom is a genuine medium, their re-
lationship with each other and with their clients,
and their dangerous involvement with a man who
is secretly determined to commit a murder.
Tessier has never been particularly prolific and
has produced only a few short stories, most of them
collected in Ghost Music(2000), but they are of al-
most uniformly high quality. The stories range from
conventional supernatural to oddball fantasy.
Among the best are “I Remember Me” (1994), in
which humans lose their memory because of a new
virus, “Food” (1988), wherein an obsession with eat-
ing leads to a terrifying transformation, and “La
Mourante” (1997), a distressing but convincing
story of a living person who falls in love with a zom-
bie because the latter is so pliable. Tessier’s fiction
comes only at unfortunately long intervals. Even his
lesser works have interesting elements, and his bet-
ter stories are beautifully written and hard to forget.348 Tessier, Thomas