The Night Class (Hardcover)

Tom Piccirilli, who has been working in relative obscurity since at least 1990 (Dark Father, a Bram Stoker nominee for Best First Novel, disappeared off the shelves relatively soon after and to my knowledge has never been reprinted), started getting attention again towards the end of the last decade. He pivked up two Stoker nominations in 1999, another in 2000, and then went over the top, winning the Stoker for Best Novel in 2002 with The Night Class. Which, I surmised, made it a fine place to start reading his stuff. I couldn't have been more right.

He first few pages of The Night Class showed up as chapter-a-day mailings about six months ago, and I wasn't too impressed. Re-reading them as a portion of the whole book, they still have the air of "we're starting off way too slow for a book that's barely two hundred fifty pages, and that's with the illustrations!", but in the general scheme of things, that's not necessarily bad. The book never really increases in pace, but the plot here (and the underlying mystery) are far less central points in the novel than is the building of the main character, Caleb Prentiss. Caleb, a senior at an unnamed university somewhere (though I don't think it's ever actually mentioned, I got the distinct feeling it's in a rural area just outside the suburbs of Chicago; don't ask me why), returns from a very bad Christmas break to discover that a girl named Sylvia Campbell, who was staying in his room while taking a class during that time, was murdered there. He becomes fascinated with finding out who she is after discovering her name and address were faked for the transcripts. In doing so, he also tries to work out the old demons of watching his sister kill herself when he was still a kid.

There's a lot going on here, including various subplots with his girlfriend, his best friend and HIS grilfriend, Fruggy Fred (a late-night radio DJ and the book's token mystic), a mysterious girl from his Ethics class who's obviously attracted to him, and another from the same class he's attracted to who doesn't care that he exists, etc. In other words, your basic stew of college life, except that there's a murder involved.

Perhaps that's what's best about it; Piccirilli does a fantastic job of using the murder, and the underlying metaphors of it (all of which lead to a rather predictable ending, truth be told), as a great parallel to the normal, everyday chaos that is life at the collegiate level. (Obviously, either Piccirilli or someone very close to him didn't enjoy college nearly as much as I did, but then they probably didn't spend those four years drunk to the point of oblivion, either.) Because of this, the various plot elements fading into the background didn't bother me in the least, and neither did their overly-quick resolutions in the final few pages (and the loose ends left untied; the ending of The Night Class is as simultaneously frustrating and satisfying as the end of Jack Martin's Videodrome). I was too busy being impressed by Piccirilli's quiet authority, his refusal to bow to the usual horror conventions and willingness to spit in a few faces in that regard, and more than anything his ability to keep the first section of the book, which bounces around in time like a superball in a rubber room, coherent. The reviews already posted on Amazon make me think that perhaps fans of more conventional horror novels will like this a lot better than I think they will. I can guarantee those who like more eclectic, existential horror (Robbe-Grillet or Dalton Trumbo, for example) will definitely get a charge out of The Night Class. Gets a point off for really sloppy editing (way above an acceptable number of typos, especially towards the end). ****