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Authors: Tom Piccirilli

Tags: #Horror

Futile Efforts

FUTILE EFFORTS
 

By Tom
Piccirilli

First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

Copyright 2011 by Tom Piccirilli

Cover by
Caniglia

LICENSE NOTES:
 

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY TOM PICCIRILLI:
 

NOVELS:

Short Ride to Nowhere

Nightjack

The Dead Past – A Felicity Grove Mystery

 

NOVELLAS:

All You Despise

Fuckin' Lie Down Already

Loss

The Fever Kill

The Nobody

The Last Deep Breath

Frayed

You'd Better Watch Out

 

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

Nightjack
– Narrated by Chet Williamson

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Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one-time 20% savings!
 
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For Michelle

Acknowledgments
 

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
.

–Table of Contents–
 

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

 

From A STUDENT OF HELL

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

Introduction for "Alchemy"
 

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

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