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Fuckin’ Lie Down Already
reviewed by
Tom Piccirilli switches genres like most folks switch jackets. This is a good thing, because his style lends itself well to several different fields, most of them within shouting distance of each other. Horror, dark fantasy, mystery, western, and more. Any day now, he'll try a Tolkien-style fantasy. You just watch. And it'll be great.
In this 73-page novella, Piccirilli enters a territory delineated by Chandler, Hammett, Cain, Thompson. Guys like that. Tough guy city. Tough city. Dark Crime. In the movies, it's "film noir." Black. Fuckin' Lie Down Already starts in the middle and zooms to a quick, inevitable ending, with just a couple stops to catch you up and prepare you for the denouement. Fuckin' Lie Down Already is black, all right. As dark a slice of Noir as you're likely to get anywhere, and perhaps darker.
There's no fat here. It's such a mean and lean story that to give you too many details would spoil it. Let's say it's a revenge tale, in which Clay, a desperate straight cop, seeks out a hitman who was sent by a mobster to "scare him off." The scaring off procedure involved the cop's family, and now Clay's racing the clock to find the bad guys and do a little scaring off himself. Payback. Justice.
This is emotional, gut-wrenching, sock-you-in-the-gut, root-for-the-good-guy kind of fiction, heir to the hard-boiled kings of yesteryear and boiled twice as hard for its proximity to horror. For what happened to Clay's family is horror, and how it changed him and shaped what he's doing and what he's about to do. If he has the time.
Clay's encounters with another cop and a junkie prostitute are gripping, heart-rending, and almost religious in nature. And the rest of the story never shrinks, never falters in its black-as-night tone and its existentialism. The climax sings with tension. And Tom Piccirilli (The Night Class, A Choir of Ill Children, Grave Men, Hexes, A Lower Deep) delivers the desired knock-out blow with enviable ease. Noir doesn't get any better, any darker, any more hard-hitting than this. The entire package, the first from Endeavor Press, is top-notch. Caniglia's cover and internal illustrations are (as always) superb, making the numbered edition a must-have for anyone who appreciates dark art and storytelling.