Shadow Season by Tom Piccirilli – review

Tom Piccirilli, a long-time fixture in the horror genre, has been pumping out some kick-ass crime shit for a few years now. The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and The Fever Kill – solid fucking reads all. That said, his latest novel, Shadow Season, marks the moment where dude fully embraces straight-up fucking stone-cold noir. That’s right, dear readers, this shit is dark, challenging, and ambiguous. To boot, Shadow Season is also about as “what happens next?” as you could possibly imagine.

It’s the story of Finn, a former NYC cop who has been teaching literature at a secluded upstate New York girls’ prep school since he was blinded by a gunshot a few years previous. When Christmas break rolls around, Finn and the scant staff and students who didn’t go home for the holiday are stranded in a fierce blizzard. If that didn’t suck enough, some knife-wielding motherfuckers come creeping around the academy with rape and murder on their demented minds.

Like an earlier page-turner from this year, Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell, Shadow Season alternates between fleshing out Finn’s past (how he was blinded, what happened back then to lead to the present situation) and covering the present day academy action. Also like Beat the Reaper, the present-day shit takes place almost entirely over just a few hours. So you’re racing along not only trying to figure out what will befall Finn and the girls in the snowed-in academy, but to find out just what the hell happened to Finn to make him blind and vengeance-minded.

Piccirilli exploits Finn’s blindness for all its horrifying potential while also managing not to bore the reader by flaunting his research or making you pity Finn for his affliction. Finn is a wonderfully complex character with many flaws, not the least of them being that he has to fight the urge to sleep with his many jailbait female admirers. Piccirilli doesn’t shy away from the violence or the sex in the fucking least in Shadow Season, and you damn well know that shit brings a smile to the Nerd’s greedy face.

Even if Shadow Season was just a smart, suspenseful thriller with lots of sex and violence, that’d be plenty enough for me to recommend it. But what puts this release into must-read territory is Piccirilli’s unflinching and gleefully noir ending. It may be more challenging than some readers might expect, but true noir fans will feel a strong stirring in their grit-caked pants.

Obviously, you have no fucking choice but to pick up Shadow Season. Well, you have other choices, I suppose, but trust the Nerd on this one:  Shadow Season should be your first choice, no two fucking ways about it.

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