Fuckin' Lie Down Already

Fuckin' Lie Down Already by Tom Piccirilli Page B

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Authors: Tom Piccirilli
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through the penultimate chapter of a book, bringing my mind into line with my fate just before the bottom fell out of the world.
    And so, as if I were a character moving at the behest of some anonymous writer, smoking Camels and sipping from a bottle of Four Roses, I did what was expected of me. I lit a candle for David Goodis. And for Jim Thompson and Gil Brewer and Peter Rabe and Harry Whittington and Bruno Fisher. And for Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini, who had initiated Pic and me into the tribe. And, yeah, I lit it for Pic and me, too. I lit it in the hope that we’d always remember where the stories come from and what’s at stake when we string the words together into the tale and send it on its way to the reader.
    Then I pushed the glowing taper into a little vase full of sand and, suddenly lightheaded, exited the church … and promptly stumbled on the last step to the sidewalk, bumping straight into a pack of Latino teens in full colors, hopped up on testosterone and the noise of something like gangster-salsa that was following them out of a nearby club.
    I mumbled an apology, which I knew, as it emerged from my throat, would only make matters worse. And it did. They pushed me like a party toy from one thug to the next, got right in my face and yelled things that, very likely, had to do with my mother. I tried to run but one of them grabbed my jacket. I shirked out of the coat and kind of lurched forward – just as that wonderful Crown Vic pulled up onto the sidewalk, throwing a big, hulking block of Detroit steel between me and the St. Lucy’s Boys’ Choir.
    I believe that Pic saved my undeserving ass that night. It should be noted that he feels my memory of the evening is, shall we say, skewed, and, beyond this, that I’ve surrendered, in the recounting, to my bone-deep tendency toward melodrama. As it often does, the truth may reside somewhere in the middle.
    Which brings us, the hard way, to Fuckin’ Lie Down Already. Because only a guy who would drive a sketchy acquaintance on a nonsensical mission to honor an almost-forgotten, morbidly depressive paperback novelist could write the story you’re about to read.
    I’m guessing that the majority of his fans know Pic primarily as a horror writer – appropriately enough, as I’m convinced that A Choir of Ill Children will come to be regarded as a classic of the genre. But while I’m a lover and proponent of the terror story, raised on Matheson and still drawn to Lovecraft, sometimes in spite of myself, I think Pic is, at heart, a stone noir scribe.
    For me, FLDA starts out as homage to Goodis and Thompson and McCoy and Brewer and Willeford and that whole cadre of 1950s paperback noir-ists. That it ends as something else is the source of its startling and upsetting power.
    Up front, the story feels like a Lion/Gold Medal fable crossed with a slew of those wonderfully gritty, blue-tinged cop flicks of the ’70s – The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mean Streets, The Outfit, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (with just a dollop of southern-fried cornpone like Walking Tall and Macon County Line thrown in). It feels like The Getaway as reinterpreted by Cronenberg – the road, the guns, the plummet toward an inevitable and bloody doom plus the leaking bodily fluids. Death Wish as reinvented by the young Kathryn Bigelow treating a bout of the old bipolar with some Michigan street crank.
    But if our story begins as homage to the originators of pb noir, it takes a turn into territories toward which those guys usually only pointed. (With a few significant exceptions: Think of the finales of Thompson’s Savage Night and A Hell of a Woman).
    Piccirilli isn’t content merely to hint. He isn’t willing to save the horror, the horror for his exit line. He moves into hell immediately, colonizes the country and then begins to mine the land, digging ever deeper toward its molten core. About three pages into this tale, we speed right through – and then past – the

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