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headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4670: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4671: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4672: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815) Horror World • View topic - BLACK STATIC Reviews PICCIRILLI'S THE NOBODY
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 7:14 pm Posts: 482 Location: Tassie, Australia
Cryer, the protagonist of this novella is a man with no memory. He came home to find his wife and daughter butchered by an intruder at their house, and the killer buried a knife in his head, with resultant brain damage. The police initially think that he was responsible and faking amnesia, but eventually they accept his story. For Cryer this past all comes second-hand, is told to him by others: he cannot even recall his given name, has become a 'nobody'. Released from hospital, he finds his home sold off to pay medical bills and his job gone. Lodged in a halfway house, he uses the super-strong hands he has developed to impose his will on the drug dealing superintendent and then sets out to recover details of his past, in the belief that it will lead him to the killer. This is a short and brutal story, written in a sparse, economical prose style that takes no prisoners and reading like a variation on The Fugitive[i], with the addition of memory loss to the mix. Cryer has no idea who he is, what he did for a living, if he was a good father, a faithful husband, and these things taunt him every bit as much the face of the killer that flickers just at the edge of memory. He wants so desperately to have been a good man, but is afraid to confront the truth of who he was, even though he knows he must do so to ever find closure. Piccirilli is excellent at filling in Cryer's character, showing the painstaking way in which he pieces together his life, chasing down leads and looking up old acquaintances with an assiduity to rival any detective, excluding the bad parts as much as he can, and trying not to give way to paranoia. Violence is inextricably woven into the plot of this book, the chief tool Cryer has at his disposal, and the way in which he uses it adds an element of doubt, so that we cannot be certain if he is a righteous man or simply a vigilante who has gone too far. The violence is shocking when it occurs, but never gratuitous, and while we are asked to identify with the protagonist there seems to be a bittersweet taste to the closure that eventually comes to him, as if he isn't really sure if he wants revenge on the murderer of his wife and child or simply to be put out of his own suffering. It is the perfect ending to a strong story, one that gripped me from first line to last. The book is available as a limited edition, with an introduction by Norman Partridge and line drawings by Alex McVey.
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