Tom Piccirilli: Newskool Southern Gothic
June 16th, 2005
Tom Piccirilli is one of my favorite members of the latest crop of contemporary horror-fiction masters (along with Caitlin R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti). I’ve followed his work since I stumbled upon A Lower Deep several years ago, and was instantly enthralled by Piccirilli’s uniquely surreal, oftimes almost Burroughs-esque style and the surprisingly creepy way in which he uses such disjointed narratives to revive age-old horror/Gothic fiction tropes such as the evil necromancer and undercover Satanists that have otherwise become parodies of themselves in myriad lesser authors’ hands. Horror is one of those genres which, by this point in its evolution, has pretty much exploited every possible plot, every possible source of human fear, and every possible constellation of characters: one need only take a quick glance at the legion of Leisure Horror paperbacks clotting the horror section of your nearest Borders to realize that almost every damn one of them is the nth rehash of the Haunted House Story, the Demonic Baby Story, the Psycho Killer Story, the Walking Dead Story, or what have you. Most horror writers today are content with endlessly regurgitating the same ol’ plots in the same ol’ ways because, really, the horror genre has become established: its readership expects certain content and will gladly pay for it, no matter how many times its rehashed and rehashed and rehashed.
Piccirilli’s work, then, just like everyone else’s, deals with one or another of these established themes - in the case of A Lower Deep, with various -mancers and their Faustian bargains for power - but Piccirilli’s will stand the test of time, and will eventually find its way into representative anthologies of early-21st-Century and late-20th-Century horror fiction, because his work takes these old, wornout tales and infuses them with a whole new unlife by scrapping so many of the genre’s default stylistic conventions (the barely-serviceable, straightforward prose and the mechanically-logical unfolding of plot) and throwing tales at you clad in amorphous clouds of surreal characters, dreamscapes that intertwine seamlessly with the waking world, plots within plots, subtle details that prove to have vast importance, landscapes that exist in no specific place or time but seem to inhabit the archetypal realm….His work doesn’t leap at your from the pages of his novels and scream “BOO!” then leave you giggling because It’s Just A Stupid Story, but seeps of the page like a hot, sour mist that leaves your skin clammy and haunts you with a shivery melancholy and an indefinable sense of dread.
In other words, Piccirilli succeeds brilliantly at the Lovecraftian dictum that horror is first and foremost about atmosphere - because even in the 1910s ol’ Grandpa Theobald had identified the fact that there were only so many possible plots and storylines to follow, and that the only way to generate a good weird tale was by amping up the weirdness of it, tweaking its atmospherics, until despite the silliness of the story it leaves you shaken. Gigantic ancient gods rising up from the seafloor to devour humankind? Pshaw! Hardcore materialist that he was, Lovecraft didn’t believe a word of it. It was just a story. And yet…who hasn’t been genuinely creeped out by “The Call of Cthulhu”? Lovecraft’s sense of style and his expert layering of scene upon scene, each growing stranger and more outre at every turn, nevertheless summoned that blubbery god from the depths and left every reader shuffling away from the story feeling like a moon is about to fall from the sky and crush him.
Piccirilli’s work is not as cosmic as HPL’s - in fact, Piccirilli’s fiction is surprisingly earthy, involving casts of Everyday Joes and Everyday Miseries….But much like Thomas Beckett could take Everyday Joes and their Everyday Language and build genuinely unsettling, out-there works like Murphy and Molloy, Piccirilli creates Lovecraftian morasses of threat from very mundane matters. And whereas HPL built all of his fiction within the New England Gothic mode, Piccirilli employs the Southern Gothic.
Add New Comment
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment