From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Five years ago, Matthew Galen left the town of Summerfell, hoping to never return. But when he gets word that his best childhood friend, A. G., has been locked up in a supermax mental hospital, Matt has no choice but to make tracks back home. A. G. has been accused of crimes that make Charles Manson look stable (for instance, when the cops finally nab A. G., they find him sitting placidly on the front porch, cradling the desiccated corpse of a young girl). Hence, as Hexes opens, we suspect that Matthew has returned to find out what happened.

But that ain't exactly the case. See, Matthew already knows.

Something's rotten in the town of Summerfell, something really rotten, like fish guts in the sun for a week. Missing persons, disinterred graves, mind-boggling acts of insanity. It's all got something to do with A. G...and with Matthew as well. There's a bizarre link between these two former friends. I'd love to tell you what it is — but then I'd ruin the story!

Let me exercise some reviewer's license for a sec, and give a crash-course on the history of modern horror fiction. The late '80s to early '90s proved a heyday for horror fiction. The market was ripe, and it got to the point at which New York publishers were releasing more than a dozen original paperback horror titles per month. Eventually, though, the output exceeded demand, and then...poof.

Horror fiction died. Bad titles and drooping sales caused a New York marketing gag reflex. After that, the only people who could continually sell horror fiction were folks with last names like King, Rice, and Barker.Butafter years of dry-heaving, the New York houses have realized that business is cyclic, and the demand for horror is back, which is why a fair share of excellent mass-market paperbacks have suddenly been cropping up in the bookstores. (Check out Doug Clegg, Michael Marano, and Mary Ann Mitchell, to name only a few.) Tom Piccirilli has been a writer in the trenches for a number of years, with something like a hundred short stories published to date, and a bunch of novels sold in various genres. His crime novel The Dead Past was recently released by Berkley to great reviews; and look for his upcoming works Deep Into That Darkness Peering, a giant collection of horror stories, and The Night Class, a new horror novel. Piccirilli is versatile enough to write in several fields. But I like his horror best, and here's why.

Even today, if you ask typical New York editors what they're really looking for in the occult/supernatural/horror field, they'll say big horror.

What do they mean by that? Horror that serves as something larger than so-called genre works. Horror that transcends its past of goth vampires, evil children, and a hundred different variations of haunted houses. Big horror is a kind of fiction that rivals in quality the King-Rice-Barker triumvirate. Big horror is something that's more than just "horror"; it's popular fiction. And with Hexes, Piccirilli has achieved this feat. He has produced a work that appeals to not only horror diehards but also the "bestseller" readership. This finely sculpted novel takes all the elements and traditions that we've grown to love about horror fiction and has expanded them into a bold new realm. This is more than a horror story. It's a story of lost loves, corrupted rites of passage and corrupted childhoods, and real people summoning the courage to reface the parts of their pasts that they don't think they have the guts to confront again. There's a big aspect to this book that, I think, equals the exotic imagery of a Barker, the classic plotwork of a Rice, and the true-life characterization of a King.

But this doesn't mean that Piccirilli has filed down the edges of the work to seem more "popular." There's stuff in this occult opus that will lift the brow of even the steeliest horror addict: libidinous, gelatinous demons, ghosts that are far more than ghosts, and infant corpses that serve as "locks" against incalculable evil. Without spoiling too much of the story, I can tell you that our protagonist, Matthew Galen, hasn't returned to Summerfell as much as he's been forced to by his sense of guilt...and something more unspeakable than you can imagine. From the moment that Matthew walks into that psych-ward cell to interview his lost and presumably psychotic friend A. G., you'll be hooked, because things definitely are not as they seem. This is all part of Piccirilli's dark art. With more surprises than an old Hitchcock anthology and an opening as powerful as The Silence of the Lambs, Piccirilli craftily leads his readers into a terrifying siphon of psychic mayhem, the dead slipping back into the domain of the living, and more occult arcana than you'll find in an ancient grimoire bound in human skin. This book is serious business, folks. It's horrifying when an insane mother tries to breast-feed her dead baby. But when that dead baby starts talking, you know there's a world of trouble coming down the pike.

Matthew Galen knows this even before he sets foot in Summerfell. What happens after that is a reading experience you'll never forget.

Edward Lee is the author of the critically acclaimed horror novel Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman (coauthored with Elizabeth Steffen) and "The Pig," found in the extreme-horror collection Inside the Works.

—Barnesandnoble.com

From the Publisher

Matthew Galen comes back home to Summerfell for a reason. Not to visit his family. Not to relive childhood memories. He comes back because his best friend is in a hospital for the criminally insane--for crimes too unspeakable to believe. But Matt knows the terrifying truth. The ultimate evil doesn't reside in his friend's twisted soul. It comes from a far darker place, a place only Matt knows. And only Matt can stop the evil--if he dares.

What People Are Saying

Tom Piccirilli
My protagonist, Mathhew Galen, is a guy who, as a child, releases evil and is forced to battle it throughout his adolescence, who loses his family and his girlfriend to this horror that's a part of him, and in a moment of weakness abandons his remaining friends and neighbors and decides to make a run for safety. Five years later he returns to discover that a part of the world he's known remains the same, the burger joint is the same, the quaint county roads and houses are the same, folks are still in their hammocks and mowing their lawns, but beneath all that lurks a madness and spiritual corruption that he must battle again. That impending confrontation is actually his redemption, and that makes for a character who's got a great many facets to his personality. We all have our ghosts, but this guy has his ghosts. We all battle our demons but he must battle his "demons." In essence, I think he is someone who gets to completely liberate himself from his own sins and failures in ways that most of us only wish we could. That makes him quite appealing to me.

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Excerpt

At least he thought he stood at his mother's grave.

But in Potter's Field one nameless marker abided as well as any other.Because of the weeds he couldn't clearly make out the chiseled numeralson the few shards of tombstones that remained standing in the area. Itdidn't make much of a difference. Their social security numbers, andperhaps a birth date, were the only way in which these dead were known.

Everyone in town realized that only a mile beyond Panecraft Hospital,somewhere on the hillside, hidden in the thickets beside the abandonedtrain station, there endured a graveyard of the anonymous, empty ofremorse and family. Less gossiped about remained the section opposite thecrumbling platform where another sunken meadow lay even more separate anduntended. Along the trail were wildflower-covered graves of thestillborn, aborted, and murdered infants who'd never been given thechance to be held in their mad mothers' arms. Whispered rumors allowedthat there were one or two elderly women who still wandered the wardscooing to their own broken fingers and rag-stuffed dolls.

It made for good theater.

Matthew Galen crossed himself out of habit. Rose petals flapped free inthe breeze and swept against the empty October branches of the diseasedsugar maples that leaned scattered across the field. He looked down fromthe hill and saw the lights of Summerfell coming on.

From here he could make out whatever sights there were to be seen on theedge of town, where you could catch a glimpse of your life unfolded.

He took the binoculars from his satchel and scanned his estranged home,feeling the nervous tension throb in him like his heart. Hefocused onthe park and watched the lamplights lining the paths reflecting off thelake; benches and playgrounds slowly emptied with the arrival of evening.Glancing north, he noticed the windows of the high school gym glowing. Hewatched as orange flashes changed to a red that cooled to blue, cut toblack, then lit up to white again. A school dance, possibly a costumeball if they still had the annual reception. Only the first week of themonth, they were already set for the season of masquerades. They'd betterbe prepared, this year.

The Krunch Burger fast-food joint prevailed, spelled out intwenty-foot-high letters of blinding neon you could see as far away asGallows, six miles across the river. A greasy short-order restaurantmanaged by Frankie "Screw with me and I'll yank yer tonsilsouttayashitter" Farlessi, with a region-wide reputation for hitting onteenage girls and killing dogs that wandered into his trash bins. Some ofthe Summerfell studs hung around the Krunch in hopes that Frankie's wife,who occasionally flashed the boys extra thigh from her slit skirt, wouldcast her heated, luscious gaze their way.

Jazz Metzner used to make it with her, Matthew thought.

From the promontory he observed a full scope of events unseen anywhereelse in town. Did they realize just how close Panecraft stood to the highschool and park? It almost seemed that the asylum had drifted fartherinto the community. He couldn't remember any parents ever having taken upsigns and picketing the way they would have anywhere else. There'd beenno real controversy, petitions, or outright hostility. His father hadbeen a masterful spin doctor, placating the county.

Matthew replaced the binoculars, hefted the satchel back up onto hisshoulder, and squinted into the dusk. He stared at the asylum, rejectinghis father's euphemisms: this psychiatric facility, sanitarium, shelterfor the distressed. Matthew glared at the stone building.

He'd been away too long.

Back in the late sixties, the overcrowded Panecraft housed thirty-onethousand patients. Now there were fewer than fourteen hundred up therebehind the leveled rows of cube windows. Most of the current denizenswere hospitalized by their own hand on a voluntary admittance basis, orcame for group drug or alcohol counseling. Of the five buildings only onemaintained a full staff and was kept in continuous use. Three others werein major disrepair and, except for the lowest floors, were shut down. Thelast was nothing more than a burned-out gutted frame that had beencondemned years before.

Epiphanies awaited him. Matthew regarded the series of interconnectedbuildings and thought of when he and A. G. had ridden their bicyclesthrough the echoing hallways. A. G., to his embarrassment, had stillneeded training wheels at the age of seven. They'd read comic books andcrossed wooden swords and flipped baseball cards against the walls, whilefloors above people lay strapped to their beds for trying to gouge theirown eyes out. Once it had been their fun house, before they'd had to findnew names for the appetite of Panecraft. He'd finally settled on callingit the mother murderer.

Before Debbi's death.

On certain nights, you could head down these back roads surrounding thehospital and watch the twining shadows of the complex cut into theskyline and carve down alongside the moon; it got you somewhere deep. Youcould feel the haunted shells of these tens of thousands of men and womenwho once dwelled here, curled in its corners. Insanity crept towardtangibility, and if possession had any truth, you could believe thisdarkness could take over the unwary. High school kids performed primitiverites of passage, knocking down the barbed-wire fences in order to tearthe lawns in pickup trucks, swigging Jack Daniel's and heaving in thebushes, sometimes using the condoms they brought, sometimes not buyinginto the facts.

His father had been the architect of that monstrosity. On the nightMatthew's mother was taken away, he and A. G. had watched the treesrustling outside the half-opened windows of his bedroom, her lovelymuffled songs and terrified squeals changing to even uglier sounds, hisfather's soft voice failing to appease her at all as men filled the houseand the screaming started.

Oh Christ...

Now A. G., too, had been imprisoned behind Panecraft's walls.

...give me strength.

And Matthew could hear him calling.

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Excerpted from Hexes by Tom Piccirilli. Copyright © 1999 by Tom Piccirilli. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The Blue Note Years
The Jazz Photography of Francis Wolff

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By Michael Cuscuna, Charlie Lourie, and Oscar Schnider with a foreword by Herbie Hancock
Photography by Francis Wolff

Rizzoli

Copyright © 1995 Mosaic Images and Oscar Schnider.All rights reserved.
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