EW: Were you working out your worst nightmare in Every Shallow Cut or is this some kind of masochistic fantasy? Pushing your protagonist through more and more pain.

PIC: Both I suppose. When you get down to it, that’s what all writers are doing. Indulging in their fantasies. Horror and noir writers are indulging in their meanest, ugliest fantasies. They’re tearing into their own scars and making them bleed all over again. And it’s off that blood that we make our art. If it’s art. But whatever it is, we create it by invoking more anguish and conflict and drama.

EW: I noticed that there are no names in the book. Why not?

PIC: There’s one name. Churchill.

EW: Right. Churchill. The dog.

PIC: Yeah, the bulldog. He’s loyal and loving to the end. Nobody else needs a name. The protagonist is just “I”, the ex-wife is the ex-wife, the brother is the brother, the agent is the agent, the friend is the friend, the lover is the lover, etc. I thought it made the characters much more iconic and, in effect, more universal and more real. We all have a brother, we all have a great love of our life, a first kiss, a terrible enemy. If I name the protagonist “Bob” I specify it and just make him sound average and mediocre. If I leave him nameless, well, then he’s me, the romantic myth of me, the truth of me, and he’s the truth of you too.

EW: So why name the dog?

PIC: That’s the exception which proves the rule. And I like the symbolism, I guess. Church. Again, it adds a kind of mythic quality to it. Makes a small story grander.

EW: I don’t want to get into any great debate on a controversial topic here, but it seems you take a stance on abortion in the story. The protagonist is haunted and guilt-ridden over a visit to Planned Parenthood. Is that true, or am I reading into it?

PIC: I’m definitely not taking a position. Even if I had one to take I don’t think I would in this kind of story. I just focus on one particularly distressing event and do what I do as a writer of dark material, which is share the pain. His marriage caused him pain, and his career, and the economy. Losing his child, what might have been his child, caused him pain. Choosing not to have a child gives him pain. This is noir. I’m not writing about butterflies. I’m choosing major life experiences and incidents. Significant matters of the heart.

EW: You write: “This is the thing I will never be forgiven for. This is the moment God will point to with his burning hand at the hour of my death.” You also mention such things as archangels with fiery swords. Did you mean to take any kind of a religious stance?

PIC: Oh fuck me, no. I’m talking about a personal relationship with fate. With the future. With death. The things that haunt you have weight and meaning and you carry them with you through life. They’re a part of you. They give your existence form. When I say God is angry with me it’s because I’m angry with me. It’s the poetry of the anguish. As a lapsed Catholic, what else could I find as powerful as images of saints and martyrs and archangels? Of course that’s all going to make it into the fiction.

EW: This might sound a little melodramatic but is Every Shallow Cut your personal manifesto?

PIC: You’re right, it sounds way too melodramatic.

EW: The definition of “manifesto” is–

PIC: I know what the goddamn definition of manifesto is.

EW: For our readers who don’t. It’s a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of an individual.

PIC: I don’t think I discuss my intentions or motives, whatever they might be, but you’ll find some of my views in the book, sure. In this one as well as in everything else I write. I revisit my themes. I return to the well of my inspiration. It’s what I have to do, especially now that I’m older. My fears have shifted. The things that used to scare me, no longer do. Things I never cared about before, now distract and draw my attention. My wife had a heart attack a year ago at the age of 47. She was taking a bath, stepped out to get dressed, and dropped like she’d been poleaxed. You want to know true fear? It’s having four paramedics crammed into your bathroom while your wife mewls in agony. It’s watching them take her away in an ambulance while you follow behind in your car trying not to spin out into traffic. She’s since bounced back and is in good health now, as good health as you can have after winding up in ICU with a stent in a major artery. Now that fear hounds us. The idea that you can just be taking a bath and and fall over dying. You don’t think of that shit when you’re twenty-five or even thirty-five. But at forty-five, I’ve had my wife and three close friends suffer heart attacks. If you don’t think that changes your view on life, and if you don’t think that changed view doesn’t wind up in the work, you’re way off the mark.

EW: Is Every Shallow Cut a confessional?

PIC: Since very little of it’s actually happened, I’d have to say no. It just feels like it might have happened. Or could happen. Or is about to happen.

EW: By confessional, I mean–

PIC: I know what confessional means.

EW: For our readers–

PIC: Your readers know what the fuck confessional means too. If you state the definition of confessional I’m going to punch you in the nuts.

EW: All righty then. You said something I found very intriguing on your Facebook recently. You also alluded to it already. I’m paraphrasing, but you wrote that the horror genre is a young man’s game, whereas noir is for older men. Horror is fantasy that focuses on the fear up around the next corner, whereas noir is about the fear that’s tailing you, your disappointments and mistakes. Care to comment?

PIC: I don’t think I can explain it any better than I did there.

EW: Do you think you’ll write straight-up horror again, either realistic or fantastical? Nightjack, your original to digital novel, is a dark fantasy-horror-noir crossover, but from what I understand it’s an older book.

PIC: I wrote it a few years ago while I was doing crossover horror-crime novels like November Mourns and Headstone City, before settling into straight crime material. I was trying to carve out a new niche for myself, so I put all my focus there. When I started working with Crossroad Press to bring out some of my backlist and novellas, I decided to publish Nightjack as well. I still dabble in horror, doing short stories here and there. Whether I do another horror novel or not...? I’m sure if something strikes me, if there’s an idea that needs to be told that’s firmly set in the field, then I’ll do it. I don’t have anything against the genre. It just doesn’t seem to hold my attention the way it used to.

EW: Nightjack is the story of a group of escaped mental patients all suffering from multiple personality disorder, who may or may not have murdered someone in the hospital, and the protagonist who can see and interact with all of the alternate personalities. So he can see and speak with the various historical figures, gods, monsters, aliens, all of whom have distinct backgrounds, including the ones inside himself. The concept of identity runs strongly through your work.

PIC: If you take my fiction as a body of work I’d have to say that it’s all about...the nature of and the search for identity. What makes us who and what we are. What defines us. Can we change. Should we change. How in charge of our own nature are we. Are we slaves to fate. Are we slaves to each other.

EW: This noirella form and style you’ve developed has served you incredibly well, I think. Some of your very best writing is at the 20-30k word length. To name some titles: Short Ride to Nowhere, The Nobody, The Last Deep Breath, Fuckin’ Lie down Already, Loss, Frayed, All You Despise, and now Every Shallow Cut. Most have been released as limited editions in the small press and are now available in digital format. Your following appears to be growing quite steadily. How did you tumble to this new formula, if that’s what it is?

PIC: It seems to be the length at which I, and a lot of other writers, can put our narrative strengths to best use. Long enough to tell a strong, impacting, chilling, hardboiled story but without the need for sub-plots and extraneous or secondary characters. It’s the baby bear syndrome. Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold. Just right.

EW: Do you like digital publications? Do you own an e-reader?

PIC: I don’t own an e-reader myself, but my wife loves her Kindle. And I have nothing against digital publication except for how it seems to be causing all kinds of havoc where bookstores are concerned. I don’t want one form to drive the other out of business. I don’t want to think of a world without bookstores. I like physical books. I’m a bibliophile. I want to hold them and sniff them and feel their weight in my hands. But I appreciate the chance to get my backlist into publication again in digital format, and I’m glad that new readers are taking a chance on the work and being generous with their comments. More work will be made available through Crossroad Press (http://store.crossroadpress.com/)

EW: Your next novel for Bantam The Last Kind Words has had its publication date pushed around a bit. Tell us about the novel, and let us know if things have settled yet.

PIC: It’s the story of a young thief named Terrier Rand who returns to his criminal family on the eve of his brother Collie’s execution. Collie went mad dog for apparently no reason and went on a killing spree murdering eight people. Now, five years later, Collie swears he only killed seven people, and the eighth was the work of someone else. Terry not only has to deal with an ex-best friend, a former flame, some mob guys, and other assorted badasses, but he’s also forced to investigate that night his brother went crazy and find out if Collie is telling the truth. But more than anything, he really wants to know the reason for why his brother went on a spree, in the hopes that Terry himself is never pushed to that kind of edge.

The novel is apparently due out now in early ‘12. I’m currently writing the sequel entitled The Last Whisper in the Dark.

EW: Thank you, Tom, for taking the time out to talk with me.

PIC: Thank you, Eddie, for not making me punch you in the nuts.