Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 162
I'd lost eighty pounds of flab in the years since Sweetie had entered my life. I vomited more than I ate. A decade at a desk putting my guts on paper had made me obese, and the dissolution of my marriage and stress over a failed career had gnawed at me like cancer.
There are things one likes so much, he has to watch what he says from fear of sounding like a babbling idiot. EVERY SHALLOW CUT, by Tom Piccirilli tied my innards in one tight, rock solid knot for the short time that it lasted. It's a noir novella*, it's not even two hundred pages long and it has no gangsters whatsoever among the character cast. No underworld to speak of. How is that noir, one would ask? A true master can write a genre story with the bare minimum. That's what Piccirilli has achieved with EVERY SHALLOW CUT. It's the most minimalistic, yet one of the rawest and most gut-wrenching examples of noir. It's one of those books you end up lending to friends all the time, whenever one asks: "Well, what IS noir?" EVERY SHALLOW CUT is noir in its darkest manifestation.
A nameless writer, a failing career and a dying wedding is a lot of weight and despair for just one pair of shoulders. He pawns his last family memories and buys a handgun, bullets and a speedloader with the money. With nothing left to live for, but his English bulldog Churchill, he leaves Denver for one last road trip to his estranged brother's house in New York. There's no home waiting for him there, but the narrator feels the need to revisit his past and face his failures once again now that he feels the end is near. He confronts his failures at love, innocent childhood love as well as domestic life partnership, his failures at finding success and status and ultimately, his failure of feeling at home anywhere. Along the way, he's writing one last novel in longhand, on legal pads, in the back of his car.
There are stories who attack you and challenge the moral core of your being. EVERY SHALLOW CUT does it in a very pernicious way. It preys on your fears of failure and nothingness. You can't turn your back on its protagonist because you're the only thing he has left, the reader of his tormented masterpiece and you can't really bond with him either as he's stuck in a place you don't want to be. This is what contemporary noir does best. The inner slip of an individual, towards depression yes but also towards violence and crime. I'm not interested in career criminals as much as desperate people, on the verge on insanity. Piccirilli understands the intimate nature of such stories and it's easy to trace parallels in between his protagonist and him. Evidently enough, both are New York natives that worked in Colorado, but I suspect they share a lot more than a geographic history.
Tom Piccirilli's minimalistic masterpiece is a testament to how you don't need much to make noir work. An increasingly frightened and confused protagonist, an oppressive environment (or at least an environment that feels oppressive to him) and a willingness to go deeper and deeper at the heart of the problem. The abandonment of self-preservation mechanisms. EVERY SHALLOW CUT is as beautiful as it is sad and depressing. Piccirilli doesn't hide it, he announces it before even the story start. There's this haunting foreword at the beginning that sets tone for the novella. It will resonate inside you like somebody smacked you upside the head with a baseball bat. I will read EVERY SHALLOW CUT again, many, many times for it's a work that has staying power.
FIVE STARS
* Or a "noirella" as Piccirilli himself qualified it.
A nameless writer, a failing career and a dying wedding is a lot of weight and despair for just one pair of shoulders. He pawns his last family memories and buys a handgun, bullets and a speedloader with the money. With nothing left to live for, but his English bulldog Churchill, he leaves Denver for one last road trip to his estranged brother's house in New York. There's no home waiting for him there, but the narrator feels the need to revisit his past and face his failures once again now that he feels the end is near. He confronts his failures at love, innocent childhood love as well as domestic life partnership, his failures at finding success and status and ultimately, his failure of feeling at home anywhere. Along the way, he's writing one last novel in longhand, on legal pads, in the back of his car.
There are stories who attack you and challenge the moral core of your being. EVERY SHALLOW CUT does it in a very pernicious way. It preys on your fears of failure and nothingness. You can't turn your back on its protagonist because you're the only thing he has left, the reader of his tormented masterpiece and you can't really bond with him either as he's stuck in a place you don't want to be. This is what contemporary noir does best. The inner slip of an individual, towards depression yes but also towards violence and crime. I'm not interested in career criminals as much as desperate people, on the verge on insanity. Piccirilli understands the intimate nature of such stories and it's easy to trace parallels in between his protagonist and him. Evidently enough, both are New York natives that worked in Colorado, but I suspect they share a lot more than a geographic history.
I walked out passed his girl and said goodbye. She wasn't doing anything. She wasn't reading or typing or texting or checking voice mail. She was just sitting there, lost inside herself. She didn't look up. I almost kissed her.
FIVE STARS
* Or a "noirella" as Piccirilli himself qualified it.