Pimping Wednesday: Review—Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli

Over the past few years, I’ve started to think that novels over 250 pages are a bit overrated. Don’t get me wrong, certain stories need a broad canvass (Justin Cronin’s the Passage comes to mind.) but 99% of the time if a novel goes over the 300 page mark, I’m usually of the opinion that the author is stretching the narrative too thin.

For some reason the market (i.e., Publishers) demand that manuscripts be of a certain length, otherwise the airport/Wal*Mart crowd won’t want to shell out $25 for a hardback. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, (namely Chuck Palahniuk, who’s novels rarely exceeds the 225 page mark) but for the most part, if you’re buying from the big six (and really, who isn’t?) you’re buying an over inflated and—at times—sloppily edited paper bricks. (But I’ll digress and sorry to turn a review into a diatribe.)

Luckily small publishers—such as New Pulp Press, Pulp Press, and the newly minted ChiZine Publications—have no issue with publishing “little” books or in the case of Tom Piccirilli’s Every Shallow Cut, books which pack the wallop of an 800 page epic in a scant 175 pages.

Here’s The Skinny from the ChiZine Publications Website :

“Alone except for his beloved bulldog, Churchill, a despondent man who's failed at his career, his marriage, and his own simple hopes makes his way across the fierce American landscape and the spectacle of his own bitter past. As he heads home to his distant brother, he witnesses various tragedies and crimes which bring out the killer in him.”

The storyline of Every Shallow Cut is a simple one: Part road story, part descent into madness, part meditation on the condition of the American dream. Piccirilli’s nameless narrator is an every man driven to the brink; full of self loathing for what he views as his “failures” and is disconnected from other people to the point of paranoid delusion. (This is most evident in his interactions with his older brother.)

Over the past several years Piccirilli’s “noirellas” have been a mixed bag of horror and noir, but with Every Shallow Cut, he’s leap frogged both genres and has created a unique disturbing, and utterly compulsive narrative voice which cannot be defined by genre. Each sentence is a sharply crafted gut punch keeping the reader on edge as Piccirilli’s no where man finally lets go of the ghost of his old life and fully embraces insanity.

If you’ve never read Piccirilli before—yes, you’ve been missing out on one of the strongest talents in the business—I would strongly suggest you make Every Shallow Cut your first foray into his extensive catalog.

Highly recommended.

(BTW, folks, if you’re interested, stop by Day Labor for my interview with Mr. Piccirilli right HERE)