Futile Efforts
By Tom
Piccirilli
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by Tom Piccirilli
Cover by
Caniglia
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For Michelle
I'm indebted to more folks than I can ever thank, but let me give it a shot anyway.
All my thanks and appreciation go out to:
Jack O'Connell, TM Wright, Ed Gorman, Gerard
Houarner
, Linda Addison, Dallas, Lee, Matt Schwartz, Rich
Chizmar
, Brian Freeman,
Caniglia
, Chris Golden, Jim Moore, Brian Keene, Tom
Monteleone
, Tim
Lebbon
, Gary
Braunbeck
, Simon Clark, Mike
Laimo
, Ray
Garton
, Joe Nassise, Tamara Thorne, Patrick Swenson, Mike
Arnzen
, Thomas
Tessier
, Mick
Garris
, Dean Koontz, and Patrick
Lussier
.
Alchemy
- introduction by Gerard
Houarner
Voice C - introduction by Edward Lee
An Average Insanity, A Common Agony - introduction by Jack Ketchum
Around it Still the Sumac Grows - introduction by Tom
Monteleone
With Eyes Averted - introduction by TM Wright
Shadder
- introduction by Tim
Lebbon
Making Faces - introduction by Gary
Braunbeck
Thief of Golgotha - introduction by Joseph Nassise
These Strange Lays - introduction by Ray
Garton
Two in the Eyes - introduction by Brian Keene
Tortures of that Inward - introduction by Simon Clark
Traveling - introduction by Michael
Laimo
Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless - introduction by James Moore
Jonah Arose - introduction by Christopher Golden
45 poems - introduction by Mike
Arnzen
From WAITING MY TURN TO GO UNDER THE KNIFE
A Long Island Tourist in New York
In Bed With It
Paradise
Sins of the Sons
On Learning More About the Sicilian
This Morning I was Mowed Down by a Runaway Train of Thought
Sycophancy (in my
Pantsy
)
Joe Friday, Myrtle, and the Diabolical Case of My Package
With the Sword of St. Michael Burning Over My Left Shoulder
Faces I Have Not Seen
My Grandfather's Fear Cut Loose Through the Decades to Perch at the Foot of My Disheveled Bed
On Reconciling Your Love, Faith, and Marriage with the Missing
Tips of Two of Your Fingers
Me and Somebody Just Like Me
Big G & Little J
My Friend Ernie, Trying to Light a Match
From THIS CAPE IS RED BECAUSE I'VE BEEN BLEEDING
Jones Beach, Thirty Years After the Last Sand Castle
My Sister
Adjusting the Atonement
The Toll of Your Personal Evil Troll
This Cape is Red Because I've Been Bleeding
Nunzio
, Sixty Years Dead, Lying at My Side, Staring
A Symbolic Interpretation of the Worst Day of My Life
Concern.
Choke and Throttle
How to Make It Through a Friday Night Without Biting Your Tongue in Two
My First Groupie and How Much I Love Her Despite the Failed Assassination Attempt
Why I Can't Stand Behind Some People, and Why You Ought to Be Scared About It
One For the Worm
It Knows So Much More Than Me
When You Look Down to Find Yourself Going but Not Yet Gone
Poised On The Division Bridge
Sunday, While The Sauce Simmers
Divinity As Witness To The Depth Of Our Darkening Love
A Countenance More In Anger Than In Sorrow
Soft And Sweet Cool Whisper Of Revenge
Sponging My Syrup Up Off The Formica
When The Delicate Fragrance Grows Too Great
A Dull Blade Slicing Off A Portion Of Prayer
Taking The Bull's Ear Between My Teeth
In An Effort To Remove The Seventh Sin From My Fifth Rib
Jealousy
My Dead Dad Can Beat Up Your Dead Dad
Driving Through the Heart of Kansas, Kansas Driven Through My Heart
Upon Releasing What Needs To Stay Caged
Mist Settling On The Faces Of My Family
By Gerard
Houarner
L
ong Island is a thin sliver of land stretching out into the Atlantic, home to the fabulous and privileged, the ordinary and the broken. Nestled between New York City's hyper-hub of civilization and the sea's raw wilderness, Long Island is like any other human-settled place. There are strip malls and huge shopping centers, stunning mansions and small, decrepit hovels, busy industrial parks and quiet, lonely bits of wasteland. Highways pulse with the flow of man and machine, while some sidewalks never seem to harbor any sign of life. Big deal.
But through a certain kind of eye, filtered by a soul tuned to the frequencies of anguish and sensitized to every twitch of pain, the Island's shadows deepen. Words exchanged carelessly between acquaintances suddenly lope to the wild cadences of subterranean need. Details lost, half-buried, in the roots and foundations of larger things suddenly quake and tremble. Cracks widen and swallow the unwary. Secrets escape. The fine dust of despair whirls in dust devils at the feet of the desperate.
Long Island in Tom Piccirilli's voice becomes something much greater than its ordinary reality. The rolling landscape of middle class dream and ambition becomes a haunted crossroads between the rational world of the everyday and the torturous realm of the unconscious. The hungers and agonies of youth burn with supernatural intensity, fueled by life-long descents into personal hells as much as by beer and hormone-saturated bodies. There are moments of dislocation in which we are startled by the recognition that expectations of a setting and its inhabitants are not going to be met, that something else is going to happen and it's going to hurt more than we can imagine. A disturbing sense of wrongness creeps like salt-tang fog over sand, through wind-warped trees, and odd things are cast off, or cast ashore.
Then things get really tough.
Anyone who's read any Pic at all knows how large the Island looms in his imagination. What follows is an extreme example of that passion. Desire, love and self-destruction seep from wounds his characters pick at every day of their lives. Then the ocean makes an offering which cuts deep, and the wounds open wider. Appetites roar as they're released from their cages. Blood and rage flow, inevitable but still surprising. We go past the warped and broken hearts, the poisoned connective tissue that has held lives together, and sink down to the bone, to the structure of the pain Pic's vision has exposed. Reality suffers a violent transfiguration.
Tom has come home, and he's showing the rest of us what the place might look like under the right –– or wrong –– light. We may feel like we've fallen off the earth, but where we've landed is as true as it is dark. It is just another place in which humans have settled and made their own.
Welcome to the Long Island of the damned.
–Gerard
Houarner
, author of
THE BEAST THAT WAS MAX
and
ROAD TO HELL