Customer Reviews

A Choir of Ill Children

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Thomas is the descendant of the founders of Kingdom Come, a backwoods and backwater swamp town. He owns and runs the town mill, the major source of the income, thus making him the town's wealthiest inhabitant. But Thomas has other responsibilities as well. Many other responsibilities. One of the simpler of which includes looking out for his brothers, conjoined triplets who share a frontal lobe and speak in the vein of a choir of ill children.

In addition, within these pages one can find a coven of highly superstitious granny witches, a young girl who may not be all that she appears to be, a preacher's son named Drub who speaks in tongues while running naked throughout the town, a private eye with more on his mind than the cases he's been hired for, and a whole plethora of other vibrant though inherently flawed characters that definitely keep the story interesting. Furthermore, the carnival is coming, and with it comes a sense of impending doom.

Throughout the course of this book, Thomas learns that both the town and his family have several dark secrets that are interwoven into a colorful yet mysterious medley. This creepy medley culminates into a well thought-out finale wrought with both mysticism and intrigue as Thomas slowly peels away the layers of his very being to discover his roots.

Tom Piccirilli has created an amazing tale, divulged via excellent prose in true Southern Gothic fashion, that will keep one's curiosity bubbling and brewing while pondering what will come next. This is more than just a mere horror novel. This is outstanding literature. A Choir of Ill Children is the type of book one will want to read again and again, as there is more to be extracted from it's pages with each reading. Pick this one up, you won't regret it!

This book was nothing like what I was expecting, but it was beautiful, lyrical, and fascinating.

The narrator radiates themes of loneliness, belonging, family, love and desire. His family history and past hurts have rendered him amoral, while capable of deep, hurtful love. Nothing is what it seems as he struggles to understand how he came to be where he is - a journey that started three generations ago and into which he has only recently stepped.

This book asks, Are monsters born or made? It's an amazing read, making you think throughout. It leaves you to find your own answers on such weighty issues. Nothing about this book is black and white, or easy, but the journey is well worth it. It'll change the way you think. Highly recommended.

As one reads A Choir Of Ill Children (peruses might be a better word, for like Thomas, the reader is always drawn back to the past) one comes to understand that horror, and the horrible, are two different things. As such this book uses the horrible to achieve its goals. Three brothers joined at the head, fates or furies as the case might be. A serial dog kicker haunts the night. A one-legged child-killer lurks, his victim a harbinger of change. And swamp witches sacrifice themselves piece by piece to stave of karma. These images are horrible, and horribly funny at the same time.

Picirilli's storytelling rides roughshod over the reader as Thomas faces a past that lives with him in an old mansion in Kingdom Come. It follows him about as he visits the stations of his own personal cross - a bar, his factory, an altar in the swamp, an empty church. The shift from external quest to the internal seeking that is its cognate is subtle. Is Thomas intent on standing still or moving on? Will there be an end, or a new beginning? I think that these may be the real questions.

Everything, sleeping and awake, seems full of signs and portents. Piccirilli intentionally overloads the textual messages, but underlying the almost symphonic interplay of key phrases and themes is a Thomas whose sense of belonging is what gets him through his challenges. He is a family looking for a way to happen, and if he can just find the right key he can put everything back together his way.

There are some stunning moments in this book when Piccirilli displays his poetic abilities in his sensitivity to language and its movement. The last paragraph of the book is one of those strangely perfect pieces of prose that will haunt you, but there are many others. This is horror in the service of literature, intended to take the reader somewhere and managing to do exactly that. Pay attention - "Our illusions have muscle and meaning."

I just had to put my two cents in....At first this book seems confusing, with a circular, foreign plot, and a through the looking glass feel. You almost want to stop reading it because your mind has no frame of reference for the story. However, the prose and suspense catch you. After progressing a little more through the book you will be absolutely hooked. By the end you will be looking for other stories by this author. I'm sure there are about a hundred metaphors I didn't get and layers of meaning I didn't plunder, but I took this story at face value, and somehow, at the end, you agree with the characters that "some questions will never be answered" and you feel oddly at peace. Definitely better than a lot of the drivel out there today.

This is really one of the best book's I've read. This is not so much horror as it is southern gothic and it is great. Tom Piccirilli weaves a twised tale of swamps, in-breading, granny-witches, and the town of Kingdom Come. Our hero? is Thomas and he with his three brothers (joined at the head) take us on a great ride through deaths, storms, love, and mutilation. This is a MUST READ. The limited edition also has a chap book that adds a chapter to the story, worth it if you can find it (limited to 100 signed copies). Tom Piccirilli is a great story teller and I hope he gives us more about Potts county and Kingdom Come.

Anyone who has read Tom Piccirilli's fiction over the years will not be surprised to hear that this novel is unique. Forget everything you might be thinking when you pick this book up, because there is no way that you have it figured. From beginning to end, this is an intensely literate, allegorical work filled with symbols and irony, memorable characters and wickedly sharp wit.
One thing Piccirilli fans will recognize is the narrator's voice. The calm, self-assured, thinking at a level just beyond the rest of the characters voice is a trademark of Piccirillian prose. In this novel, that narrator is Thomas, elder of four brothers. The other three, Jonah, Cole, and Sebastian, are co-joined triplets, sharing a single brain but with very different world-views and agendas. Assaulted on one side by the granny-witches, who claim the horrendous storms and flooding afflicting the town of Kingdom Come can only be combated using his sperm, to the child-molesting ghost from his past that visits him both in waking hours and dreams, to the knife-toting redneck who despises fencing, Thomas is confronted with one challenge after another.
Thomas is not only the heir to the huge old house and family fortune, but to the one real business that Kingdom Come can boast - the Mill. Nearly everyone in the town looks to him for either money, sex, guidance, salvation, or some combination of the four. Problems that affect the many are laid at his feet. Like the young girl found alone in the swamp sitting on a rock. Like the Cocaine addicted student film maker, Sarah, who falls in love with one of the triplets, driving her camera-man boyfriend away in a drugged, confused stupor. She sits endlessly at the brother's feet and listens to one of them recite love poetry to her as Dodi, the young daughter of one of the granny witches works toward either Sarah's end, or her ejection from the "family."
Thomas sees it all, and understands it all - or tries. As the story progresses, and the pieces wind and twist into tighter knots, his own history and that of his family, and Kingdom Come itself begin to reform into an altogether different picture. Nothing is as it seems, in Kingdom Come. Nothing is as any of the characters believes it to be, nor is it as the reader will believe it to be. It is far worse, and infinitely more intriguing.
This is southern gothic fiction at its best. Comparisons have been made to Faulkner and Flannery O'Conner, but I'm not sure they do this justice. I don't say this to disparage the classics, but to point out that this is very obviously of our day, and our age. It is not an old classic, but possibly a new one in the making. Only in the deepest reaches of the American culture could you find such exquisitely intertwined lives, rife with sub-plots and intrigue, incest and all that's best, and handed to you in language that makes it seem not only believable, but real - or at the very least, possible.

Piccirilli may well be the most interesting "horror" writer of our day. His characters are deeper and more alive than any you'll find in the books of the genre superstars. CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN (and to a lesser degree his earlier novels) reminded me of David Lynch's early works (ERASERHEAD and TWIN PEAKS) and the more twisted novels of Jerzy Kozinski (THE PAINTED BIRD). He'd probably have more commercial success and appeal to a wider audience if he toned down his hyperbolic imagery and dumbed down his prose. Thankfully, he hasn't. For readers who appreciate strong page-turning material from the pen of a brilliant writer, this is a great place to start.

Wow, what to say about this book? Thomas lives with his 3 brothers, who are conjoined triplets joined at the head and sharing a brain. His best friend is an often naked, prophetic preacher. There are two filmmaking students who are staying with Thomas while making a documentary, and one of them falls in love with one of the triplets while there. Oh, yeah, and there is also the "swamp girl" who lives with them. There are also one-legged child-murderers, their dead victims, swamp witches who cut off bits of themselves to stave off the coming storm, and bizarre canvivals. All of these elements come together wonderfully o tell a very strange tale.

A Choir of Ill Children is simultaneously lovely and disturbing, lyrical and horrific. Piccarilli's prose has a poetry about it, even while it is describing something horrible. Parts of the story reminded me of kudzu (hey, the story is southern gothic, so that leads me to kudzu): green and vibrant, and hiding god only knows what underneath. I loved this book. It was one of my favorite reads of the past year. I highly recommend it.

Tom Piccirilli, A Choir of Ill Children (Night Shade, 2003)

Whoa. When I read The Night School a few months back, I knew Tom Piccirilli was a good writer, but it certainly didn't prepare me for this. A Choir of Ill Children was recently the featured horror novel at chapteraday.com. With books that pop up there, I usually read all five days' worth of material before deciding whether I'm going to check the book out of the library, buy it, or whatever. With A Choir of Ill Children, I stopped reading halfway through day one in order to put it on hold at the library; I'd finished it by the time I got the mailing for day five.

A Choir of Ill Children is the best American horror novel since Kathe Koja's Skin a decade previous, and the two novels serve to illustrate in how many different directions American horror has exploded. Koja writes surreal, existential horror novels (even for young adults; her most recent novel, The Blue Mirror, is eerily reminiscent of her tour de force, Strange Angels); Piccirilli, at least in this case, is firmly rooted in the Southern Gothic tradition. While closer to Koja's horror-of-absence than King or Koontz' things-that-go-bump-in-the-night, this difference between the two is like night and day. Well, more like dusk and dawn, but you get the idea.

Thomas is the wealthiest man in Kingdom Come, and the most shunned. His three brothers are conjoined at the frontal lobe, making the older residents scared of him, and the younger residents (who've never seen the boys, who stay in the house at all times) afraid of him the same way normal kids are afraid of a haunted house. Thomas' best friend Drabs, who's kind of a combination between a Pentecostal and an epileptic, tells Thomas the circus is coming to town, filmmakers have shown up to do a documentary on the triplets (one of whom falls in love with the narrator), and all the dogs in town are getting kicked by a vicious, but unseen, criminal. And that's what things look like before they get weird. Believe me, they get weird.

A Choir of Ill Children isn't so much a horror novel, despite what I said above, as it is a tragedy; it's about as close to classical tragedy as American literature can get. That is to say, when the revelations finally come at the end, they're somewhat predictable, but they're supposed to be. This is more Hamlet or Oedipus than it the The Thirty-Nine Steps. Piccirilli has created a true work of genius here, and one that will stay with you long after you've finished this book. A must-read. *****

Never has a book by Tom Piccirilli come together more beautifully. His characters, his prose, and his story are captivating from beginning to end. Tom definitely deserves a Bram Stoker award for this, or at the very least, a nomination. I can't tell you how great a writer Tom is and I urge you to give A Choir Of Ill Children a try. Disturbing and beautiful at the same time, this novel pushes open the bountries of modern horror fiction and gives the genre more legitimacy than ever.