A Choir of Ill Children

A Choir of Ill Children
Tom Piccirilli
2003, Night Shade Books
ISBN 1-892389-58-4

I've been in this church a hundred times and hardly ever think of my grandmother skewered to the shingles, but now I'm having a hard time getting past the image. She hung upside down for most of the afternoon, rotting in the sun, until she was discovered by my mother, who'd been sent to search for her. My gaze keeps drifting towards the rafters, to the west wall where strange words were found outside. Reverend Clem Bibbler knows why I'm looking there but he doesn't comment. (p. 78)

A Choir of Ill Children is a gorgeously written southern gothic, lush with grotesques and grotesqueries, with a plot as dark and thick and wild and twisting as the wild kudzu growing over the swamps of Kingdom Come. This is a must-read for afficionados of the strange and surreal, filled with spare but poetic prose vividly told in the present tense. Only an artist can carry this difficult tense off smoothly for the length of a novel, and here Piccirilli proves he's a master.

Thomas belongs to the wealthy but decayed first family of Kingdom Come, along with his three brothers, Sebastian, Cole, and Jonah, triplets conjoined at the forehead. He lives in the family's nearly empty mansion with his brothers and a girl named Dodi, who was given to him by her mother the granny witch Velma Coots as payment for Thomas' handyman services. When the story begins, he's also dealing with Sarah and Fred, two hopped-up university students who want to make a documentary about the triplets. Thomas would cheerfully kick them out of the house, but Jonah's fallen in love with Sarah, who is repulsed by the freakishness of the three brothers, and Thomas is reluctant to break his brother's heart.

Thomas isn't a perfect man — he has a penchant for young road house whores, for example — but he does his best. He lives in harmony with the town's eccentricities and superstitions, not wanting to be driven to madness like his father, who sought to conquer the swamp and ended up throwing himself into the grinding machinery of the family's mill, years ago. From trying to help his friend the reverend's son, who is prone to stripping off his clothes and speaking in tongues, to paying a private detective to identify the mute girl found on the old sacrificial rock in the swamp, Thomas takes care of his people. But when Kingdom Come's granny witches seek his blood and semen to ward off the evil heading toward town, Thomas finally balks and plunges himself into a momentuous summer of nightmares, violence, and dark family secrets.

Piccirilli does an expert job of weaving together an amiably bizarre cast of characters with a surreal southern atmosphere of heat and madness to create a tale that seems to be going in every direction at once, but finally ties itself together again in a dark and bloody climax. If this novel has a weakness at all, it may lie in the final chapter, which is oddly goofy compared to the rest, but even it raises its share of questions, and the reader closes the book with the sense that the story of Kingdom Come is far from over.

A Choir of Ill Children is southern gothic horror at its best: quiet, twisted, and bloodstained. Go buy it.

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