Father Panic's Opera Macabre

by Thomas Tessier

Neil O'Netty, a successful young historical novelist, is enjoying a leisurely driving tour through the rugged countryside and ancient hill towns of eastern Italy, when he is forced to seek assistance at a remote farmhouse. There he meets the beautiful Marisa, and her elderly relatives. What starts out as a brief idyllic interlude in his journey soon blossoms into a fierce, all-consuming affair with Marisa.

So intense is his passion for her, so complete the spell she casts over him, that Neil scarcely has the time or interest to consider the disturbing and mysterious signs around him—the vast decrepit house itself, with its hidden rooms and passageways, the bizarre sounds that echo through it, the gunshot in the night—that form the physical and spiritual maze in which he finds himself. Marisa's defiant and deathless eroticism is the thread that leads Neil into the nightmarish center of the labyrinth and propels the story to its shocking and unforgettable conclusion.

Father Panic's Opera Macabre is a tour de force, elegant, seductive and utterly compelling, a total experience. It is something completely new in horror literature.

Genres: Horror

170 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Thomas Tessier grew up in Connecticut and attended University College, Dublin. He is the author of several acclaimed novels of terror and suspense, plays, poems, and short stories. His novel Fog Heart received the International Horror Guild's Award for Best Novel, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist, and was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of the Year. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews

[Fortneyroad.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's best to just read nothing about this novella. It is a VERY brisk read since you really can't put it down once you begin. Tessier is a master at creating mood and that sense that something just isn't "right" and he creates it in spades here.

The first 100 pages are a great mystery...and the last 50 are a great horror.

People have posted they don't "get" Tessier's stories or they end too suddenly, but everything you need to know is in the story and sometimes answers don't come easy. His novels and stories are to mull over for a bit before posting a review.

And this novella is one you won't easily get out of your mind and probably one you will read again to see just how he did it.

Highly recommended.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

We were away at a science fiction convention this past weekend, so everything's a bit sleepy and tentative around Noirish Towers today. This will be just a quick note . . .

Historical novelist Neil is motoring around Italy when his car breaks down near a big old mansion occupied by a strange group of old people, a forceful priest and a red-hot babe, Marisa. Marisa offers to put him up for the night while the servants do something about his car. Cue a bonkathon. A few days later, as Neil wonders if he really wants to go home, ever, there's an abrupt transition into a different place and time, where Neil witnesses acts of unspeakable sadism and finds his own life at risk.

There's a lot of fairly explicit sex in the first two-thirds or so of the book, and for me it didn't seem very convincing. While I was assured from time to time that Marisa was voluptuous an' drop-dead gorgeous an' all that, she never really seemed to emerge as a person. Now, this might be Tessier trying to indicate that Neil never saw past the sex-partner aspect of her -- or, more like, never tried to see past it -- but I'm not sure I can buy that. He's a novelist, after all: it's his job to see below people's surfaces. Besides, from time to time the possibility of a future with Marisa crosses his mind: you don't think that sort of thought if your interest in the other person extends no further than worrying if you might have pulled a muscle in the midst of position #43.

Here's his initial impression of her:

Neil found her very attractive. Marisa's skin was milky white, with a faint rosy glow, and she had long cascading waves of very fine black hair that was not glossy but had a rich, subdued luster, like polished natural jet. She was about 5'6" tall and her body was sleek but gloriously voluptuous. Neil wondered what color her eyes were -- even through the sunglasses, he could see flashes of light in them.

It's all on the surface, like something out of a product manual: "Your new appliance is about 5'6" long by . . ." Yes, I can see him noticing the skin and the hair, but I can't believe he'd estimate her height (although he might note that she's quite a lot smaller than him, just up to his shoulder -- that sort of thing) or not try to read her character from her smile. Does she read Emily Dickinson in her spare time or bellow at televised boxing matches?

I found the later section of the book pretty abhorrent. I gathered from the notes at the back that the scenes of cruelty and carnage are based on events in Croatian concentration camps during WWII -- apparently even the Germans blanched at descriptions of what went on there. That such things really happened does not, I think, offer justification for what's really just a protracted wallow in sadism -- if anything, it seems to me to make it worse.

All in all, then, I didn't enjoy this book. The author does display a certain narrative ability that shouldn't be underestimated, but the novel/novella seemed to me to be, in both its sexual and horrific content, a sort of adolescent production. The same went for the plotting, but that's for another day.

[Rodrigo Tello · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lustful romance turned into a hellish splatterpunk nightmare. I loved the gore and violence here, Tessier is a true master of the bizarre and macabre. In addition, there is a historical framework related to the Nazis and religion that seemed to me to fit perfectly, and makes it all that much more bestial and absurd.

[rndgmoat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a late-era Tessier that I think may have been a trunk novel; the internal world of the story seems to omit cell phones, GPS, and the internet as a whole. Anyway, it's a pretty decent horror novella.

Neil, a middle-aged novelist (gee is there any other kind of protagonist in these kinds of books) is living in Italy, where he is anxious to drive the country roads and experience the "old world" he anxiously believes to be disappearing in the face of a homogenized capitalist future. So of course his car breaks down right by a crumbling wreck of an old mansion. Neil is immediately captivated by Marisa, the sexually available but lonely heir of a dying family legacy. Sparks immediately fly, and Neil is so busy getting sucked into an escalating sexual fantasy that he speeds by all number of bizarre and foreboding developments...until suddenly he is somehow experiencing a regional variant of the Holocaust, in extreme and graphic detail. Some more crazy shit happens and then the book ends on an ambiguous note.

This is a book that's thick on atmosphere and grotesque horror; it has a dreamlike logic that can't be neatly "solved." Perhaps the best interpretation would be that Neil has stumbled upon a tract of land haunted by Europe's bloody history; but who knows. We can also have a debate as to whether the Holocaust is tasteful fodder for horror fiction; but I frankly think Tessier mostly pulls it off. By no means essential, this is a porny, brutal read for hardcore aficionados of the genre.

[Adam Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's really more of a 3.5 star book, to be honest. Decently written, if workmanlike. The first two thirds of the book are acceptably creepy, but the final third revs things up a great deal.

[Jim X Dodge · Rating 2 out of 5]

The ending didn't make any sense. It's like he took two different ideas and smashed them together without tying them into each other very well.

[Roger O · Rating 4 out of 5]

for about half the novella you are lulled into the idea that this is going to be a quiet uncanny gothic tale and then well… you just have to read it.