Giles Blunt: Cold Eye (USA 1989)

From the Publisher:
Enter the Fury-haunted and terrifying world of artist Nicholas Hood and be sure you will not, cannot, leave it before the final cast of fate's dice. Nick is a despairing and angry man. At thirty-five he has yet to make a significant sale; among the half dozen artists at his dealer's show, he is the only one overlooked by the Times's critic; his paintings of imaginary murders in vivid New York settings, while admired for their technique, are faulted for their lack of conviction; his musician wife, Susan, is the sole breadwinner. Nick is entertaining thoughts of suicide when he meets a strange man in a bar, a dwarfish, pitted, and hideous man with a compelling voice and message, one Andre Bellisle.

Bellisle says he can help Nick -for a price - and proceeds in chilling fashion to prove his point. He can foresee the deaths of others and can thus position Nick to achieve the reality that has eluded him in his murder paintings. Success, huge success, soon comes, but at a price beyond the misty borders of nightmare. How thin the membrane between witness and participant. between recording artist and unwitting subject. between executioner and con-demned, is the reiterated lesson of the mysterious Bellisle and his Faustian pupil.

With no louder volume than the flittering squeak of a bat in a closed, dark room and offering as delicately terrifying an effect as a cold breath on the back of the neck at hearthside, Giles Blunt spins a tale of controlled guignol. Cold Eye is as inevitable as myth and as horrifyingly persuasive as tomorrow's mayhem headlines.

Giles Blunt: Cold Eye. Arbor House / William Morrow, ISBN: 1557100470 (June, 1989), 288 p., $16.95.