Clown In The Moonlight by Tom Piccirilli; Crossroad Press; 2012; 466 KB pgs; $2.99 US

Fans of Tom Piccirilli know that at this point in his career he’s become a pretty well established mainstream author of crime thrillers for a major publisher.  Fortunately, for those of us who have followed the author’s growth and popularity for all these years, Piccirilli has not forgotten his small press, or even better, his earlier horror roots (a period some would argue, where he had released his best work).  With Clown In The Moonlight, his second original horror release from independent e-publisher Crossroad Press, Piccirilli returns to early form, and does so brilliantly in a tale chronicling the extreme physical, psychological, and pathological pain of a couple of groups of misfits.

In Clown In The Moonlight, Piccirilli bases his tale on the true story of a young man named Ricky  Kasso who had tortured and killed a teenager for, as the headlines pronounced, satanic purposes.  Piccirilli begins his story after the murder has occurred, regaling readers with brutal but imaginatively rendered prose of the killing, its aftermath, and its consequences.

The lead character is a nameless man who is somewhere in his mid to late twenties who is filled with rage over his abusive upbringing, a stay in the Amityville Psych Center, a stretch in Bellevue, and a few stints in jail.  In addition, his rage is fueled by a notion that he may be touched by the supernatural, as Piccirilli leads us to believe he can communicate with the dead and that he has the ability to manipulate and be manipulated by evil.

We are introduced to this young man when he is brought to a corpse in the woods by a local girl named Linda.  The corpse is a victim of a man named Ricky Kelso, a well known drug dealer and practitioner of the dark arts. To say that Linda is sexually turned on at being in the proximity of the corpse is an understatement (and we soon discover that her excitement is contagious).  It turns out that she is a member of a cult called Knights Of The Black Circle and that Ricky is their leader.  Eventually, after some sexual fun and games between the young man and Linda, she invites the young man to meet Ricky at a gathering that evening.  The young man agrees, and while there he not only meets Ricky, but another young girl named Gwen.  Linda, Gwen, and the young man wind up in a three-some that is as kinky and savage as anything Piccirilli has put to paper.  But as vicious at that ménage-a-trois turns out, the depravity of the evening had only just begun for the three of them.

Piccirilli then flash forwards us two years and we learn that Ricky had been arrested for murder and had committed suicide.  We also find out that Gwen has been in a coma as a result of what happened at that gathering two years earlier, and that Linda has changed her ways and is a church going woman and wallowing in guilt.  But nothing has changed with the young man, he is as aimless as he was back then, and he continues to battle his rage.

As the fates have it, he is once again invited to a gathering with occult overtones, this time by a young woman named Mercy who he meets in the grocery store   The cult throwing the party is called The New Knights Of The Black Circle and they are led by the White Queen who is promoting the power of positive Wicca magic.  The young man discovers at this gathering that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The story ends with another flash forward.  We now learn that the young man isn’t so young anymore and that he has found a profession as a Narc in New York City.  Then, after a brief revisit with some earlier characters, we are thrust into another horrendous real life crime, the Central Park Rape, when we get a more defining glimpse into the lead characters relationship with the evil that has dogged him since he was a child.

Tom Piccirilli knows that deep in our souls a spot resides where sickness dwells, and he is at his absolute best when he’s providing sustenance to those ills.  And don’t expect to be spoon fed when he serves up his blend of violence and cruelty, instead, brace your self for fist sized doses of brutality in Clown In The Moonlight that are large enough to choke even the toughest of us.

Piccirilli has not written so feely about extreme sex since his contributions to Inside The Works, nor has he written about violence this unrelenting since Fucking Lie Down Already.  Clown In The Moonlight is a gut wrenching tale that explores humanity at its worst, and though I usually have difficulty reading stories with plots that are as brutal as this one was, if I do choose to take a fictional trip to hell, there’s nobody I’d rather ride shotgun with than Tom Piccirilli. This is Piccirilli at his small press best and I highly recommend you pick up Clown In The Moonlight.

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Feb 16, 2012

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