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 by Thomas Tessier
Back then, in the mid-1970s, I was living in London with my wife, Alice, and our newborn son, Sam. We had a comfortable flat in Kenton Court on Kensington High Street, and I had a job at a small publishing company, Millington Books. At night and on weekends, I worked on my own fiction, and had recently sold my first novel, The Fates.
I wanted my second novel to be a werewolf story. The werewolf has always been one of my favorite creatures in horror literature, folklore and film. Part man, part beast, dangerous, an outcast, perhaps misunderstood, unseen until it is too late, and always nearby – as close to us as the dark side of our own natures.
At that time, the only werewolf novels I knew of were Guy S. Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933) and Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think (1948). Endore’s book struck me in particular, not only for the way he made the fairly graphic violence and sex that is depicted in it an integral part of his character’s identity, but also for the delicate ambiguity he maintains throughout. The reader can never be entirely sure whether it is the account of a man who transforms into a genuine werewolf from legend, or who is merely human, caught in a descent into madness.
Or maybe it’s both at once.
It was exactly that zone of ambiguity that I wanted to explore in The Nightwalker. What we call character in a human being is usually defined by what that person believes, thinks and feels, and by what they do. What they do -- alone, and with other people. What is happening to Bobby Ives? Who is he? Not to be cute about it, but to this day, I’m not sure. And that doesn’t bother me in the least. In our natural desire to tie things up neatly, we sometimes lose the real story -- and for some of us, it is the story that is real.
There is another “character” in The Nightwalker that I want to say something about: London. I loved living there for 7 years, I loved walking about it, taking things in, enjoying the architecture, the parks, the streets both beautiful and ugly, and the endless buzz of human activity. The office where I worked was in Southampton Row, around the corner from Russell Square. I often walked the 4-mile distance between there and my flat in Kenton Court, and I always tried to vary my route to take in another couple of streets I hadn’t walked before.
On the map, the big green thing between where I lived and where I worked is Hyde Park and the adjacent Kensington Gardens. I walked the Park countless times when I was writing The Nightwalker, taking every path, getting to know all its twists and turns, some of which would turn up again in a later novel, Finishing Touches. One of the books I published at Millington was London: The Secret City by Michael Chambers. It had been published in a tatty paperback years before, by a one-man-band publisher who had long since disappeared. I managed to get in touch with Michael, and we soon agreed on a new edition with illustrations and better maps. Michael, and his book, taught me about some of the unseen history of London – the underground rivers, the bloody history of Hyde Park. Though often unnoticed even in broad daylight, the lingering history of any place never really goes away. It is always nearby, like the werewolf. I tried to use a little of that ghostly history in The Nightwalker.
London is one of those great cities that is electric at all times. It’s always a matter of different years, decades, different styles, different players. In the middle of the 1970s, the punks exploded on the music scene, glam rock was dead. Things were changing yet again, but it was also the same old London of seedy afternoon drinking clubs, metered cookers and diminished expectations. I tried to catch a wee whiff of that, too, in The Nightwalker, the minuscule distance between the past and the present, how people's lives intersect and how they can be reshaped and changed forever, in an instant.
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