Tom Piccirilli may well be the most literate, poetic voice our field has ever produced. No, really, he's that good. And November Mourns proves the case effortlessly.

Shad Jenkins gets out after two years in the slam for assault and returns to Moon Run Hollow, a grim place filled with inbreeding, moonshine, and ghosts. One thing on his mind. Find out who killed his beloved sister Megan. And kill him. Problem is, she was laid out on a road in the hills where everybody's afraid to go, dead with barely a mark on her. Shad keeps getting told to leave, by his father (who first told him to come back), by the only dedicated sheriff's deputy (the sheriff's openly on the take), by his old lover and friends and enemies both, and even by the local hex woman. But glimpsed at the edges of his vision, the ghosts of his mother and sister seem to urge him on to some sort of investigation. And nightwalking Shad feels the obligation deeply after having missed two years of his little sister's life.

Shad's no detective, but he acts like one. Taciturn, prison-educated and stubborn, he flows from suspect to suspect, ignoring those who warn him off or who remind him it's his chance to get away from the moonshiner mentality and madness that permeates the hollow and surrounding hills. Shad's a strange hybrid—the insider who's become an outsider—and his eyes become ours. Piccirilli periodically slides into an easy second-person POV, directing his/Shad's observations at the reader ("you") in an almost confidential way, giving the story a hushed tone of revival tent confession. Oblique dialogue and small actions carry the import of much greater significance. Backwoods religion tinged with Appalachian magic realism combine with snake-handling, a truly bizarre practice that's a natural for horror, and open incest to create an unforgettable tableau of desperation and resigned existence that's at once exhilarating and oppressive.

In the course of his investigation, Shad learns about the snake-handling people down the Gospel Road, where his sister was found, and the wraiths who bite into your legs. He learns that things have a way of shifting like patterns just beyond your sight, things at the edges of your vision, and that letters written and left in bottles or set adrift can say so much, if only you'll find them. By the time Shad learns all this, others will have died and yet others will have faced their own desperation. It's no accident that every dog Shad's pa ever owned is named Lament.

The comparisons to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey come naturally, given the superbly realized southern setting and the twang in the local voices. But there's more bubbling beneath the surface, as there always is in a Piccirilli novel. Caught between the timeless Shakespearean themes of fate and free will, Shad is not unlike Hamlet, casting about for someone on whom to take his revenge while driven by restless ghosts.

Steeped in heady atmosphere and a strong sense of poetic tragedy, November Mourns blends horror, mystery, noir crime, and southern gothic with an ease you just have to admire. His ability to wrap tension and voice and atmosphere together make Tom Piccirilli (The Night Class, A Choir of Ill Children) one of the most versatile writers in any field, if only more readers would take note and enter the strange but convincingly real worlds he so carefully depicts with well-chosen details and words. Tom Piccirilli is horror's poet laureate, and the story he tells won't soon be forgotten.