Remaining Strange

I’ve talked about my father a lot, in this blog and across most of my fiction. Which remains strange because I barely knew him and all that I really discuss is this man’s shadow and myth and the Oedipal trauma under which I continue to labor. He was a handsome slim Sicilian kid who lied about his age to join the Navy during the tail end of WWII. He was a jock and engineer and the foreman of his crew at Gruman. He helped build the Apollo 11 space module. He spent the last year of his life taking me to a ton of horror movies. He left a deep impression on me.

I didn’t know he was sick. I was seven. Most seven year olds are apparently sharper than I was.

I don’t fully understand why I didn’t quite get it, except that my mother, knowing I was a sensitive kid, apparently fought to keep me in the dark. We borrowed a barker lounger from my uncle to give my father some comfort. I recall leaping up onto his lap and hearing him groan loudly. It scared me. I faced him and spotted a long, inflamed biopsy scar across his throat. I remember being shocked into silence while he tried to soothe me, saying, "Don’t be scared, it’s okay, Tommy."

He was dead a short time later. I didn’t know about it. They didn’t tell me until after the funeral. I was shuttled to my aunt’s place where the family took turns looking after me while they sneaked out to attend services and wakes. It probably isn’t so easy to fool most seven year old’s but I was blithely unaware. I was a dumb shit. They took advantage of that fact. They decided it would be easier to break the news to me after first pumping me up full of laughter. My 18 year old brother and my cousins took me down in the basement to teach me how to play Monopoly. They rigged the game so I’d win all the property and money. I was overjoyed and giggling like a hopped up pothead when my brother brought the sledge down. He was a dumb shit himself. He said, "I’m your new father. Dad died."

I tore ass up the stairs and made an Olympiad standing jump into my mother’s arms. She was waiting alone on the couch.

Later on the anger hit. I felt betrayed and empty that I hadn’t been able to mourn with everyone else. I felt abused and hyper-assinine because they’d all been in the know, creeping around me in my ignorance. Somewhere down the line I found my brother’s journal. I wasn’t interested in his anything about it except one day. Nov. 4, the funeral. I read the couple of pages over and over. It had stormed horribly and my brother drew a few gravestones with slashes of rain.

The next day I went to read the journal again and it was gone. I found it torn to pieces in the trashcan. I questioned him about it and he told me I’d violated him by reading his secret thoughts. Like I said, he was a dumbshit kid too. He didn’t pick up on my need to share in the mourning. He wasn’t wise enough to understand the need for a closure I could never entirely have.

So my old man was gone at 46, and the number took on a greater meaning the closer I came to it. Writers live and die by these kinds of symbols. They lend meaning and purpose to the craft and the intent. We’re all painfully self-aware of our own need for drama. And so I give you my upcoming birthday on May 27th. On that day I turn 46. I match the extent of my father’s life, if not his testament. No matter what I accomplish in this life I feel like I can never match him. I know that at least a part of this is wild insecurity on my part. The rest has something to do with living in the looming shadow of the dead.

All of this has added to my incessant struggle and pursuit for identity. Taken as a body of work, I would say that my fiction deals mostly about the search for identity. And nowhere else is this more clear or obvious than in my original-to-digital novel NIGHTJACK. The symbolism is clear. So’s the theater and the drama. So’s the fear.

In an effort to do some damn thing to semi-celebrate my b-day, to note this watershed year, I decided to reduce the price on NIGHTJACK to .99 all across the board. On Amazon, B&N, the Crossroad website, everyplace. Go, enjoy. And find yourself.

Here's the info:

On the day of his release from a mental institution Pace is taken "hostage" by Faust, Pia, and Hayden, three escapees from the hospital who disappeared after the presumed rape and beating of Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of the Greek munitions tycoon Alexandra Kaltzas. Each suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, experiencing complex delusions and sometimes fantastical identities. Pace tries to piece together what happened when apparently one of their alternate personalities tried to kill Cassandra.

Pace himself is an alternate of William Pacella, a man whose wife died in a restaurant fire set by a local mobster for insurance money. William Pacella "dies" so that Nightjack can be born-a new personality who may or may not be Jack the Ripper.

For unknown reasons, Pace is able to see others' delusions-when alternates take over members of the group, Pace alone is able to interact with each persona. Included among them is Princess Eirrin, a ten thousand year old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne; Smoker, a half-breed gunman from 1880s Arizona; Thaddeus, friend and companion to St. Paul; and the ancient Greek architect Daedalus, who soared among the clouds with his home-made wax wings and watched his son perish in the sea.

Now the four find themselves under attack from assassins sent by Kaltzas to punish the person who attacked his daughter. Conflicting stories abound about Cassandra-whether she was raped, if she was perhaps murdered, or if she and Pace somehow crossed paths even before the hospital. In fact, she may not even exist.

As the attacks persist, the group is forced to face their own personal traumas and terrors, and go in search of Kaltzas in Greece. There, on an island where fantasy, myth, and truth are all entangled, Pace and his many alternates must sift through madness and deceit to unlock the mystery. And everyone may wind up dead unless Pace willingly unleashes the most brutal killer of all: Nightjack.

PRAISE FOR TOM PICCIRILLI & NIGHTJACK

"Tom Piccirilli straddles genres with the boldness of the best writers today, blending suspense and crime fiction into tight, brutal masterpieces."-JAMES ROLLINS, New York Times bestselling author of The Judas Strain

"You're in for a treat. Tom Piccirilli is one of the most exciting authors around. He writes vivid action that is gripping and smart, with characters you believe and care about. I always pay attention when I see his name."-David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of FIRST BLOOD and THE NAKED EDGE"

Tom Piccirilli is at the forefront of the new breed of crime writers, welding his sense of history to a modern sensibility, creating a strong new voice."-Max Allan Collins, author of ROAD TO PERDITION

"Tom Piccirilli writes like a crazed banshee. I love his work."-KEN BRUEN