The Deceased

I always think it is a bad idea to have a horror novel about some one who writes horror novels. Isn't that most often the plot to some Tales From The Crypt story --the writer is sweating blood at the typewriter as the incarnation of whatever evil creature he has imagined rises physically from the swamp and is knocking on his door.

Jacob Maelstrom is a young, somewhat successful horror writer who is the son of Isaac Maelstrom, a fantastically successful horror writer. In addition to being burdened by his father's reputation and his ridiculous last name, Jacob is also the only survivor of an incident involving his older sister, older (and paraplegic) brother, his mother, his father, and an ax. The sister, after locking Jacob in his closet, has apparently killed and beheaded everyone including herself. That last one must have been quite a trick. The heads are missing. This all happened ten years before the novel begins.

Piccirilli is at his best when he gets his characters into a confined setting, one that often has few geographical or physical relation to the outside world, and then turns loose an assault of past and present, living and dead, the relatively benign and the genuinely evil. In The Deceased Jacob returns to Stonethrow Island to confront the ghosts of his past. They are there waiting for him. He is followed by two young women, one of whom is pregnant by Jacob's literary agent and another who, having recently been released from the pscyh ward, wants to research Jacob Maelstrom for her thesis. This is a horror movie set-up, something Piccirilli has not stooped to his other novels I have read. It all takes place in one night during a torrential storm. The young women soon realize they should have stayed home. Jacob has a lot on his mind. There are family ghosts, the muses (animal spirits that inhabit the forest? I was never very clear about that.), and a house you can get lost in, literally forever.

There is incest, ax murders, spirits that want to feed off the living, but then again, what else are they going to eat? As crazy as all this sounds, it is much more mundane that other Piccirilli novels, and when you get lost in the plot it becomes irritating rather than part of the wild ride the author usually provides. If you have never read a Tom Piccirilli novel, this is not the place to start.