THE DEAD PAST & A STUDENT OF HELL

Horror writer Tom Piccirilli displays his versatility with mystery and poetry.

By Denise Dumars     June 14, 2000

'And now for something completely different,' is the theme of this review. We expect, after all, horror fiction from horror writers. We don't expect mystery novels or horror poetry. But perhaps our expectations need to be expanded, and different genres and forms of writing explored from time to time.

Tom Piccirilli doesn't like limiting himself to just one genre or one form of writing. For example, when I began reading his mystery novel, THE DEAD PAST, my first thought was, 'Oh, no, a story about a guy and his grandmother and a murder; I hate cozy mysteries.' But upon further reading, I found that I admired the seamless method Piccirilli used to merge the sub-genre with its more noirish, hardboiled cousin. The cover of the book depicts a cute kitty-cat, yet the obligatory pet in the book is actually a Rottweiler named Anubis, after the jackal-headed Egyptian funerary god. Anubis is shown as both a loyal pet and a formidable adversary, and contrasts of this sort are the marks of distinction in this novel.
The book begins with Jonathan Kendrick receiving a late-night call from his wheelchair-bound grandmother in upstate New York, who has just found the body of a local petty thief stashed in her trash can. Kendrick has his own problems to deal with, but is convinced that this is sufficient trouble to warrant his attention.
Setting means a lot in Piccirilli's work; just as in his horror novel HEXES, where a town can be both mundane and supernatural, so too the quaint village of Felicity Grove where Kendrick's grandmother lives is also a hiding place for plenty of dark secrets. Kendrick stumbles upon several of them, risking his life in the process. Fortunately, Anubis is there to save his bacon.
THE DEAD PAST and Piccirilli's other mystery novel, SORROW'S CROWN, are clearly marketed at readers of cozies, but this only reflects the limits of the publishing industry's view of category fiction. His mysteries are dark enough to satisfy the reader of noir and hardboiled mysteries and, hopefully, provide plenty of guilty pleasure for the cozy fans.
And now for something completely different...again. Piccirilli is also well-known for his horror poetry. He is currently nominated for a Rhysling Award, the award for science fiction, fantasy, or horror poetry given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His poem, 'Badges of Either's Woe,' co-authored with Michelle Scalise and published in the magazine EDGAR: DIGESTED VERSE garnered the nomination. From the poem:
A haunting left floating in a tree, in the foam Rain bearing down in a requiem of utter worship and wail/Bleeds a burning sea into this weeping...

Clearly, imagery and a sense of melancholy are earmarks of Piccirilli's poetry, and this is true of much of the work in A STUDENT OF HELL, his poetry collection. The poems in this volume are very literary, not the hack-and-slash variety of horror poetry that so often serves as filler in horror fiction magazines. Here are a few lines from 'Lazarus, Beckoning':
I've been catching new flavors for several days now under my tender tongue where other raw ghosts await I've laid down and risen more times than they can cover me/there's not enough dirt beyond the gate to do the job anymore...

Piccirilli's poetry is certainly within the horror genre, but any literary critic not told that this was a horror collection probably wouldn't peg it as such, for the horrors here are mainly psychological in origin, true 'monsters from the id,' not from the laboratory. Domesticity and all the horrors it implies also provide plenty of real-life horrors for the poems, as in 'Sunday, While the Sauce Simmers,' a poem about family, and its own special brand of horror:
The television's spitting, there's static in the attic and old photos of men you only meet when you're dead, the lasagna getting as cold as grandma...

The poems in A STUDENT OF HELL are wise, ironic, and sometimes downright cynical. Note that the preposition in the title is 'of,' not 'in,' noting a particular type of scholarship, perhaps. In the ugly domestic scenes of Piccirilli's poetry it's always raining, the women are all Delilahs, the sins are all Biblical. Perhaps this is a new genre of poetry that should be called nourish horror or--my own term--noirpunk. Whatever you want to call it, it's a superior volume of poetry. And as poetry mascot Vice Versa Man would say, 'Read some poetry before your minds turn to mush!'

THE DEAD PAST, by Tom Piccirilli. Berkely, 1999. 200 p. $5.99. ISBN 0-425-16696-1.

A STUDENT OF HELL, by Tom Piccirilli. 56 p. $10 from Skull Job Productions, 1012 Pleasant Dale Drive, Wilmington, NC 28412-7617. ISBN 0-9675774-0-3.