After just a few sentences, the reader who opens up Tom Piccirilli’s self-described noirella (noir novella), Every Shallow Cut, will be hopelessly immersed in the unfathomably dark narrative: “I was three days into my life as a homeless loser drifter when they broke my nose and dropped me on the street in front of a nameless pawn shop. I hit like two hundred pounds of failed dreams.”
Revolving around a nameless writer who has recently lost his home to foreclosure and his wife to infidelity and divorce, it’s a story about desperation. “…I remembered that I was a man with nothing left to lose who wrote stories about men with nothing left who did ungodly acts of violence against each other.”
With just a beat-up car, a bulldog named Churchill, and an illegally purchased handgun, the nameless novelist – with nowhere else to go – sets out from Denver on a cross-country journey to his estranged brother’s home in Long Island. Traveling through a surreal, apocalyptic landscape of deserted towns and areas beleaguered by biblical floods, the gun-toting narrator eventually makes it back to his hometown in New York and comes face-to-face with numerous past failures – his first love, his unstable relationship with his older brother, etc.
In one memorable sequence, the novelist – on the verge of a murderous rampage – stops by his agent’s office and shows him his manifesto, illegible scrawling filling four legal pads which he has been writing on his travels. In another scene, a fellow novelist critiques his new work:
“It’s a real page-turner, thoughtful, insightful. There’s a poignancy to it that’s lacking in your other novels. You’re writing from the marrow. I can feel every shallow cut you’ve ever suffered in it, all of them still bleeding, tearing wider and becoming deeper.”
But as the narrator moves closer to the edge, to his seemingly inevitable bloody end, even his “divine cathartic expulsion” loses meaning…
The joy of reading Piccirilli (The Coldest Mile, The Cold Spot, Shadow Season, et. al.), at least for me, comes from experiencing his imagery-laden narrative. Here are just a few examples:
• “My eyes were so black they looked like they’d been gouged out with an ice pick.”
• “I’d thought I’d put down some deep roots over the last ten years but they’d all been tugged up like a handful of dying weeds.”
• “His eyes burned like twin lakes of flaming gasoline.”
This was a fascinating – and fast – read. Every Shallow Cut isn’t quite crime fiction or horror, but a story that deftly treads the boundaries between both genres. If I had to categorize it as anything, I’d call it a darkly nuanced thriller since it’s essentially an exploration into what happens when the stresses of modern day life become too much to handle for one man. And there’s a real sense of authenticity and timeliness here – Every Shallow Cut does a brilliant job of reflecting the feelings of economic and existential hopelessness that so many people are experiencing in today’s society.
This powerful little noirella will surely delight – and disturb.
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for the last two decades and has written thousands of reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and BarnesandNoble.com. In his free time, he reads.
Keep up with all of my blogs – as well as all of Barnes & Noble’s exclusive reviews, authors interviews, videos, promotions, and more – by following @BNBuzz on Twitter!
