Customer Reviews

The Dead Letters

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Piccirilli writes dark. His novels are full of dread, sadness, and his characters often have little hope. They are all misfits of some kind and all of them have lost something. It could be their limbs, their lifestyle, their freedom, their sanity, normalcy, or a loved one. In this book it's the loss of a child that haunts the protagonist.

The plot concerns a man who has dedicated his life to finding the serial killer who murdered his daughter, and then other children. The killer smothered his daughter in her bed while she slept with her own pillow. After several more killings, a twist comes into the case. The killer starts kidnapping children from abusive homes and then brings them to the families of the children he killed.

This novel has all of the characteristics you come to expect from a Piccirrilli novel. A main character filled with tremendous loss of some kind, guilt, and a need for closure or acceptance. It has some really strange people in it in the form of a wacky cult who's involved with their own serial killings whose members who are as odd and deadly as they come. The story has supernatural elements with both the wacky cult and the main character himself to keep horror readers adequately enthused. And it has an ending that defines a Piccirrilli novel.

I enjoyed this novel much more than Headstone City. Its plot was straightforward without a lot of sub plots or distractions. Its mood was sullen and depressing giving punch to the chills and very thrilling portions of the story. And the story itself was disturbing enough to make me come back to it in my mind after I finished the last page.

When an author writes a book as great as November Mourns, (or even Choir of Ill Children) there is a tendency to compare all other books he writes after it to that masterpiece. This is unfair to the author (look at King's work after "It") and it's tempting to do so. But I'm gonna do it anyway...this book is not as good as the two mentioned above, but it is certainly a great read and I would place it at number 3 of my all time favorite Piccirilli novels. I would recommend this book to Piccirilli fans and to those who have not read the author before.

T.T.Zuma

Tom Piccirilli's novels just get better and better and The Dead Letters is no exception to that theory. HisownPicSelf drew me into the story with his tragic "hero" Eddie Whitt, a man with a dead daughter and an insane self-abusive wife.

Being a father myself with a young daughter, I can relate to the wide range of emotions that Eddie goes thru and that makes this novel real for me.

Great scenes, bizarre characters, superb dialogue and a nice satisfying sad ending, this novel really had me close to tears several times.

Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy, read it and tell me why I'm wrong.

Troy

I ran into Tom Piccirilli's work several years ago with a little cult
horror gem called "Hexes" and was absolutely amazed at the quality
of the writing. Here was a guy writing literate cult horror. Since
then, I've read pretty much everything he's written and have
watched his stories slowly change from cult horror to taut thrillers.
And his writing just gets better and better...
Tighter than a drum, with sentences as clean as steel, so
beautifully polished they make you want to shout. Or maybe scream. I
was so seriously impressed with Dead Letters that I read it twice.
Well, the first time I just raced through to find out who the bad
guy was and missed a lot. The second time I revelled in the prose itself,
in the characterizations,in the oddities.

I don't want to stretch this review out to thousands of words which
you won't read. You want me to tell you whether or not this book is
worth reading. That is the value of this review, both to Amazon and
to the author. Hell, yeah, it's worth reading. My semi-autistic son
read it in two days and couldn't put it down. The story itself is a
killer. A serial child murderer who turns into a kind of Robin Hood,
stealing children from bad homes and placing them on the doorsteps
of the parents whose children he's killed? How much worse than this
does it get? Our hero in this story is a guy called Eddie Whitt,
who was the first victim of the guy he unknowingly dubbed
"Killjoy". His five year old daughter, Sarah was abducted and
killed, his wife ended up in an institution, biting her hands to
the bone, and Eddie was left with the problem of finding this guy,
this killer. When a baby is left on his doorstep, he gives it back,
getting a message from his wife: what kind of a father are you?
How much more painful than this does it get? Actually, it gets worse.
Whitt is getting cryptic nonsense letters from Killjoy which may or
may not hold clues as to his identity. And, poor Whitt gets involved
in searching for a murdering cult member who just might be Killjoy.

This story is so full
of pain and empathy that you"ll get another one of those lines
between your eyebrows just reading it. It puts you right there, where
poor Whitt is, his child dead, the changling returned, and his wife
biting herself to bloody bits. It is a painful story which gives
the word "catharsis" a whole new meaning. But, I should throw this in,
there is also plenty of comic relief to lighten the incredible tension.

Too many words already. Well, what do you want me to say? Good
book, read it. Yeah, that too. You want a short review. I can't do
it. Piccirilli is a really terrific writer, one of the best writers
in the English language extant, regardless of genre. When you open
page one of one of his books you fall into a landscape from which
you cannot escape until you reach the last page. Nobody writes like
this. Except TomPic.

Piccirilli really personalizes the psychoses of the players in this novel, spinning even the smallest parts into 3-dimensional characters. Very unpredictable, it kept me guessing until the very end.

I have tried to read it twice, the first time I got maybe fifty pages in because I had no clue what was going; the only thing I got out of it was that it was a very dark and depressing novel of a serial killer who is taking children and giving them back to the parents of the children he murdered originally. okay. The second time I read it I got about 150 pages in, I had an idea of what was going on now but I still couldn'd get passed the depression and dark atmosphere that Picccirilli created. Im giving this book 4 stars because I think thats exactly what Piccirilli was intending. A very dark, atmospheric and depressing read. It had the same feel as "The Straw Men" by Michael Marshall but that wasn't as nearly dpressing as this. I definitley will read the rest of the book one day but at this point and time im just not ready.

One disclaimer: this is a very different pool we're swimming in with Tom Piccirilli. The focus of his work is shifting from his early poetic horror works towards suspenseful thrillers. His last novel, "Headstone City" seemed to be an in-between book, touching on both the supernatural and mystery.

With "The Dead Letters" we're almost completely there. Of course, there's still several horrific elements and in the end, this book still plunges us into the dark alleys of the human psyche, much like his other works.

The good news is that if you've enjoyed his other books, than you'll more thank likely enjoy this story, as well.

What if you haven't read his other books? Fans of a good suspense story, like those of Thomas Harris and David Morrell, will enjoy this. Although he certainly throws several suspense/thriller conventions on thier heads, the story is ultimately redemptive and bittersweet.

This is perhaps Piccirilli's most mainstream novel to date but that doesn't mean it lacks any of the quirky characteristics of his earlier work. The Dead Letters is still chock full of odd characters caught up in surreal situations, all told in the unique and lovely voice that so many have come to adore. I highly reccomend this book to new and old fans alike, anybody looking for a great, dark story with real wit and style.

While I don't remember what first turned me on to reading Piccirilli, it's super easy to figure out why I keep reading him. His writing is strong, his characters well-defined and his stories engaging. Every book by him I finish cements his position as one of my favorite authors.

The Dead Letters follows Eddie Whitt as he refuses to let go of his daughter's death at the hands of a serial killer named Killjoy. Even when Killjoy changes his m.o. and starts delivering kidnapped babies from abusive homes to the parents of his murdered victims, Whitt won't let go. His life for the five years since his daughter was killed has been a pattern focused on finding and killing Killjoy. Something that makes him irrational enough to hurt himself in the process; his frustrations cause him to do things to calm down that had me cringe.

As readers, we experience that same frustration and desperation. We become involved with the weird cult family that has clues necessary for finding Killjoy. We hurt as Whitt's grief and pain bleeds off the pages. The book is something you will not want to put down. I'm not sure what else to say except go read it. Piccirilli is not someone to miss and this is novel is pure Piccirilli.

4 AND 1/2 STARS

Tom Piccirilli has been on quite a role over the last few years and he deserves all the accolades he's been getting. The quality of his writing is stellar - both original and deeply moving. I had some minor problems with a drawn-out fight sequence towards the end, but other than that, I very much enjoyed this thriller/mystery.

Although this is still in the genre family of horror, I would love to see him delve into straight horror one of these days. While he doesn't write with a typical, conventional style, this is where he separates himself from the average published novelist. His words have deeper meanings than what is just on the surface, and it's always a pleasure to begin to figure them out. This book is a dark, rich, and disturbingly psychological ride - one you won't forget for a long time.

I bought this because I read Midnight Road and thought it was great.

But, this book just didn't live up to expectations.

For one thing, I felt a portion of the premise, the wife/mother in the insane asylum, was just a bit out there. Don't get me wrong, I know that losing a child would most likely be the singular most horrible experience I cuold imagine. I can also easily see a woman killing herself over it during the grieving period.

What I can't see is a woman going insane completely and still being insane 5 years later when no evidence of prior mental problems was given. It would have been a little more plausible had the woman done something, or NOT done something, that may have caused her child's death, but that wasn't the case here.

Also, the letters: Well, I found them to be filler. I think it would have been far better had clues been intuited from them or that they had any reason at all to be part of the story.

All in all, I just found the book to be too big of a stretch from the way the police spoke to the main character to who the bad guy turned out to be.

I've purchased another of his books; I hope it will be better.