A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli
My rating: 4/5 cats
“…listen to me – things are different down here. This is the deep South. There are laws that don’t apply.”
“You’re an ugly, disgusting people.”
“No worse than most I’d guess.”
and i understand his problems with it – when something is compared to faulkner and flannery o’connor, you have certain expectations as a reader, and while this book definitely borrows the tone of those southern masters, there is something out of control in its narrative that doesn’t reach the heights of its own blurbs. and i am giving it a four-star cat rating, even though i am feeling a high-three. i have read too many three-star cat books lately, and this one, while frustrating in places, was way better than the others. my star cat-ratings are always extremely subjective, which is pretty much why i review, so i can work out my feelings.
here are some of my feeeelings:
this book is like a diorama of southern bizarro: conjoined mystical triplets, underage sex grenades (an expression i totally just stole from dan simmons), murder, suicide, pregnant nuns, speaking in tongues, folklore, witch-healers, alligators, white trash catfights, amputations for the good of all, a mysterious carnival, and a main character who lives in this liminal space between reality and ghostly apparitions.
and it’s a hoot, but sometimes it gets to be a bit much. it is a tiny book, but it is somehow a slow read, because there is a lot of re-reading necessary. the story is tricksy, and there is never one of those handy “you are here” signs. it reminded me so much of The Obscene Bird of Night, which is a supremely grotesque and convoluted book. greg and maureen have great reviews of it – i read it pre-goodreads, and i do not have the balls to review it now, but if you want to read something completely mind-blowing and possibly vomit-inducing, and which is probably going to confuse the shit out of you, that book would be a good place to start. so having loved obscene bird, and having loved another book by piccirilli, The Last Kind Words, i think i was predisposed to like this one more than krok zero (joel, collect your dollar, even though i think your prediction may have been an insult to me?)
it definitely is not a perfectly-constructed novel; characters come into and out of play, drifting through the scenes just to perform acts of strangeness or discomfort for the benefit of the reader, and there is never really a sense of where the story wants to be going. the reveal of the mystery is a mystery we never knew we were supposed to be looking for, although it almost accidentally solves the riddle of “who is kicking all these dogs??”
and the last quarter of this book is a pretty out-of-nowhere bloodbath.
and yet… i liked it a lot more in thinking over having read it then while i was actually reading it, because now i can see the full scope of it. but i still don’t know what it is. it is a noir-magical-realism-ghost-crime story, i guess. but i still don’t know what the story is, other than a dark slice-of-life story in which horrible things happen. and i think i will want to re-read it sometime, now that i know where it is going to end up, because i think there were probably a lot of scattered clues throughout that i would appreciate a second time through.
spooky month continues…
** but all of that is incorrect!! here is the real review, from deborah:
I thought it was a beautiful and moody read. I think it failed to be truly scary, but it was ugly enough to be interesting. Dreamy and strange.
my work here is done.
