Haunted Pelican Press

The Editors at Haunted Pelican Press caught up with Tom Piccirilli recently and asked him to share his thoughts on writing, Five Strokes to Midnight, and what other dark delights he has in store for his fans. He’s the author of sixteen novels including A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN, THE DEAD LETTERS, NOVEMBER MOURNS, and HEADSTONE CITY. You can learn more about him and his work at his official website: www.tompiccirilli.com

HPP: Tom, first off, congratulations on being nominated this year for both a Bram Stoker Award and an International Thriller Writers Award for Headstone City. Did having two different nominations for that book come as a surprise?

PIC: A tremendous surprise and a great honor. The novel came out early last year without much fanfare, but it seems to have picked up some momentum along the way, which is always nice to see. I appreciate the positive reader reaction and all it took to get the novel on those particular ballots.

HPP: One of the unique aspects of Five Strokes to Midnight is the idea of each author having a theme for his or her stories. What would you like readers out there to know about your theme of “loss” and how you went about choosing it?

PIC: I wanted to choose a theme a bit wider in scope and open to a greater emotional resonance than something that might appear to be a bit more obviously “horrific” on the surface. “Loss” is such a vague and indefinable concept and yet everybody understands it and everyone’s suffered from it. And under the umbrella of that theme damn near anything can fit, so it gave me lots of room to move, and plenty of areas I could choose to go.

HPP: Most anthologies contain only one story by a given author. Did you find it any different, writing more than one for the same book and being asked to have them fall under one theme?

PIC: I think it’s more natural to do more than one story when mining a specific topic or subject. You get your head into that particular place and wrapped around a certain idea–which might be very ugly or painful–and sometimes it takes a few days or weeks to get it unwrapped again. But while you’re there in that place, why not mine as many tales as you can? It’s one of the reasons why I prefer doing novels nowadays–if I’m going to go through the trouble of diving into that dark well then I hope to get something with real heft to it from the ordeal.

HPP: How would you describe your two stories, “Loss” and “Bereavement,” for readers who are curious?

PIC: “Loss” is a novella that’s part murder mystery, part ghost story, part blackly humorous tale about two former friends who’ve carried their own scars and ghosts with them to a creepy building which has a bunch of its own. “Bereavement” is one of my “hospital tales.” I hate hospitals with burning fury and whenever I use them as a setting for my stories I know I’m going to deep into an ugly place for a while–it’s one of my most unsettling stories I think, more so because it’s a quiet tale.

HPP: You have a new novel coming out soon, The Midnight Road. Care to give your fans out there a taste of what to expect from it?

PIC: It’s a crime/mystery/supernatural suspense fusion about a Child Protective Services worker who stumbles into a strange situation at a wealthy family’s home, winds up in a car chase, and “dies” in a frozen harbor. He’s revived a half hour later by paramedics but for the rest of the novel he’s got a talking ghost dog giving him grief, and he’s hunted by a mysterious killer who seems to blame him for something he’s unaware of.

HPP: In recent years, you seem to have developed a cross-genre trademark in your novels, mixing what reads like a hard-boiled mystery with elements of horror and surrealism, as you did in your most recent highly acclaimed book, The Dead Letters. Is this something we can expect more of in the future?

PIC: I suppose it’s a natural evolution of my style and voice, and my love of dark literature. A noir story where someone’s haunted by his own flaws and sins can be just as or even more horrific as some hero being chased by a demon or monster. The older I get the more I prefer to tell my stories from a more grounded, realistic viewpoint. The oddity, horror, darkness, and weirdness often comes from some emotionally torn up protagonist or bizarre situation he winds up being forced into. The older I get the more I realize we all have our ghosts to carry.

HPP: We know you like to keep busy, could you give us an idea of some of the other projects you are currently working on?

PIC: Later this year a novella entitled “Frayed” will be out from Creeping Hemlock Press, the folks who brought out the very unique and intriguing antho CORPSE BLOSSOMS. They’ll also be doing my crime novel THE FEVER KILL. Two new novels will also be showing up in early ‘08. A (more or less) straight crime novel for Bantam entitled THE COLD SPOT and a Hellboy novel for Dark Horse tentatively titled EMERALD HELL.

HPP: We’ll wrap up with one more question about Five Strokes to Midnight. What do you think readers will like best about the book?

PIC: The eclectic mix of styles, themes, and voices. A lot of “theme anthologies” force authors to write tales that might be a bit too similar to one another under the auspices of a single theme, but here we all get our own topics and can expound upon them as widely or go as deeply as we need to in order to tell the best stories we can. We’re a pretty diverse bunch of writers, and I think readers will enjoy the stew of styles.