Wicked Things [Mass Market Paperback]

Thomas Tessier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2007

No missing pages, Water Damage, or stains. Spine shows creasing. This is a readable copy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Freelance insurance investigator Jack Carlson is looking into a rash of accidental deaths in the rural town of Winship. When he reaches the Norman Rockwellesque community, he finds that people there aren't just dying, they're disappearing as well. Soon Carlson is awash with more questions than he can handle: who murdered the town's insurance salesman and his secretary? why did the town doctor commit suicide right in front of him? who, or what, is the mysterious Order of St. Michael? And what's with the town's unearthly, late-night glow? Carlson is an appealing creation, and Tessier has dropped him into the middle of an intriguing twilight zone scenario. Unfortunately, once Tessier sets his world spinning, he's unable to hold it all together, and he ends the story without revealing answers to any of the questions he's so painstakingly raised. Included is an unrelated novella, Scramberg U.S.A.; it tells of a young hoodlum's revenge against the town that done him wrong, another interesting tale that gets away from its author in the end. The result, Tessier's first original novel in almost 10 years, makes for an addictive but unsatisfying read.
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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 338 pages
• Publisher: Leisure Books (May 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0843955600
• ISBN-13: 978-0843955606
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,134,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Wow, this was bad, June 5, 2007

By 

sph (United States Of Whatever) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wicked Things (Mass Market Paperback)

Like the Publisher's Weekly review above, this book is a stinker. It starts out promising, with Jack Carlson headed to an idyllic little town to investigate some fishy insurance claims.

As most readers know, Stephen King is the master of creating idyllic little towns with dark, horrid secrets just below the surface. Unfortunately, Thomas Tessier isn't Stephen King. Along with King, Tessier attempts to cross-weave some of Dan Brown's famous secret-society intrigue. He's not Dan Brown either. The town, intended to be creepy and mysterious, comes off as vague and undefined.

The vaguely-intriguing premise quickly dissolves into a mess of red herrings, loose ends, and clunky, awkward dialog. We meet some cardboard-cutout characters who deliver plot-advancing statements. We even get a few puerile, clumsy, sex scenes involving women who say improbably-graphic things lifted from the "Letters" sections of men's magazines.

The plot is equally pathetic. There's something vaguely weird in the town, people die off, maybe it's a conspiracy, maybe it's a cult, it's all hazy and unclear. I'll save you the six hours it takes to read this book and tell you that the ending provides no answers. A vain attempt to pull off a sinister and dramatic ending falls laughably short of the mark.

In addition, there are few a bizarre moments that reference the story being set in the late 1970s. Tessier does nothing with this setting, except maybe provide a convenient excuse not to give his characters cell phones or other technology. It's just another half-baked concept thrown into an already-messy concoction.

The paperback edition includes another short novella. Sadly, "Wicked Things" was so bad, I saw no reason to continue reading.

I don't know how the publishers obtained the favorable review quotations on the cover, but those methods were far and away more creative than the book itself. Skip this one in favor of almost anything else.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Another Let Down, June 18, 2007

By 

Joshua Koppel (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wicked Things (Mass Market Paperback)

I was very disappointed in Tessier's FINISHING TOUCHES but this one looked much better. Jack Carlson is an insurance investigator. He has just been handed a case of seventeen accidental deaths insured by seventeen different firms but all sold by the same agent. The case takes him to a small upstate town. At first the town seems like a typical small town but then he notices small inconsistencies. Then the insurance salesman getts jittery. Then people begin to die. Jack begins to get very lucky with the ladies.

This is a strange town where strange things happen. The sky glows. Sometimes the ground glows. The ground sometimes shakes. People disappear. An old arganization seems to own a lot of the town. But how does it all tie together? How will Jack figure it out? How many more will die befoe Jack exposes what is going on? I don't know. I read it but the ending was cheap and offered no explanations. All in all a big disappointment.

Like with FINISHING TOUCHES the book is filled out with a long short story that takes place near the town in the novel. This is a tale of small town justice and what it might bring. Unfortunately it, too, ends rather suddenly without true explanation.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mileage May Vary, June 13, 2007

By 

William D. Bolden "book addict" (Huntsville, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wicked Things (Mass Market Paperback)

If a storyline about an insurance investigator being sent to investigate a small "upstate" town that has some link to an old cult and chanting in the streets and strange sights going on sounds sort of familiar, well...let's just say another good name for this novel could have been The Wicker Shadow over Hobbs End. But horror is full of cliches and rehashed stories, it is all in the telling. Too bad Tessier never quite gets the spark of life going in this one.

The main character is a slice of old noir detectives: masculine, a little undisciplined, a hit with the ladies, and generally an agent of good. His investigation pivots upon the suspicious behavior of one man acting as agent through several companies. This seems proof enough that something dark and sinister is going on.

The problem is, you have a man that is so paranoid that a free agent whose claims come through over a a couple of years sets off his hackles, but a small town that has an unprecedented view of an aurora far brighter and more active than any real world equivalent merely annoys him a little. He is convinced murder is going on, but continues to "stir the pot" long after he could have called in some contacts and stopped himself into increasing danger.

By time the weird factor starts to truly amp up, and some honest mysteries are being laid out--the part of the novel that should be drawing the reader in until the end--you realize that the pace of the story is not speeding up at all and you are past the half way mark. Red herrings have cropped up here or there (the best/worst one being an "adult strip" that seems largely to be an excuse to get the protagonist laid from time to time). Fifty pages from the end and the pace is still chugging along at the "build up speed" stage. 20 pages from the end, and what might be a climax starts to show up. It ends with a very flat note.

By the time you get to the end, you begin to wonder if Tessier originally envisioned a different novel and was not sure how to end it, or if some other constraint kept him back. No matter how excited you got through the first three-quarters (and I stayed pretty excited up to even past that point), you realize that there is no ending at all to the vast majority of things that the novel has been about. I can deal with the lack of real explanations (or at least I could deal with some things being unexplained). I can deal with a few red herrings in a horror novel. I can deal with a "twist". But when the twist is "the main character is in a horror novel...da da dumm!"; it just feels a little like a cheat.

I can read "small towns gone awry" novels all day long. I especially love creepy little kids and strange old churches. But these are woefully underused, background flavor that gets only about as much wordplay as the description of what sort of shirt a stripper is wearing right before sexually satisfying the main character. Possibly even a bigger shame is the fact that there are hints, here and there, that Tessier was going for something more ironic from time to time...a small town that is not awry but just seems that way and things are getting out of hand.

It has some good points, some of which are really good. Most of the rest is adequate enough to get the point across. But the lack of conclusions leads you to think either a sequel is coming along or there was no real explanation for any of this. Couple this with some notably cookie cutter characters, pacing that does not adapt to the flow of the situation all that well, a plot that asks questions too late in the game, and a storyline that feels a little too rehashed, and the book is one that can probably be avoided, unless you are huge fan of the writer, the genre, or are needing a "dark" beach read.