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Gumbywan

Randolph "Dilda" Carter

A rant about books, horror, and the weird.  I sometimes take on my love/hate relationship with goodreads and Amazon.

Currently reading

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories
Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, William Shatner
Progress: 140/336 pages
Pavane
Keith Roberts

Dropout Now

The Night Class - Tom Piccirilli

Wow, this wasn't anything like I thought it would be. I expected some campus slasher novel and got this crazy amazing psychological novel dressed up as a horror story. I'm not sure where to start. Anyway, Tom's experiences in college must have been pretty bad to create this nightmare of academia. Imagine academia as one big putrid conspiracy theory.

Caleb Prentiss has had it with prancing professors and finally loses it in class. But it isn't just the teachers that are putting the pressure on Caleb, see his parents are dead, he's living in his redneck girlfriends backyard shed over winter break, his sister, the nun, committed suicide in front of him when he was a little kid, and a girl got whacked in his dorm room over winter break and they didn't catch the guy or clean up the mess very well. And then things get really bad. By the end so many bad things have happened to poor Caleb that he's pretty much circling the drain. He'd like to quit school but I'm betting he doesn't make it the six more hours it will take to drop out. Enough paranoia to make you look over your own shoulder, especially if you are in college.

No way are you going to figure out where this is going so it becomes a page turner. Picirilli's prose is dense and wavy, lush with metaphor and palpably sensuous. Except for Caleb most of the characters are two-dimensional leading to a somewhat melodramatic feel to the whole thing at times. This isn't a problem, lots of good books have these good and evil type characters that we only see one side of. It makes the flip-flop more dramatic.

I loved it. I think this is generally rated so low because most people don't get what is really going on here. I guess they are expecting a slasher or a werewolf on campus thingy and not some psychological dread paranoia hopelessness novel.

I've got to check out more of Piccirilli's stuff since this is my first brush with him.

 

I know, what's with that pimply butt?  It's the only cover that came up from Amazon.