Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 169 kb (eOriginal)
Order ALL YOU DESPISE here
Other Tom Piccirilli Books Reviewed:
Fuckin' Lie Down Already (2003)
Every Shallow Cut (2011)
Clown in the Moonlight (2012)
The Last Kind Words (2012)
We're all slaves to our childhoods. We're all taken hostage by the dramas and myths instilled in us early on.
Reminders that the publishing industry is evolving are everywhere, no matter what big shot publishers are telling you. Tom Piccirilli isn't that easy to find on bookstore shelves, but if you hit the Kindle Store, you will find his complete plus some exclusive digital stuff like ALL YOU DESPISE. We all know how fond I grew of Tom Piccirilli's writings over the last year. I can understand someone not having the financial or time resources to commit to a novel, but Piccirilli is somewhat of a novella chef. He does them in all sizes, prices and flavors. ALL YOU DESPISE is as bite-sized as it comes, but will churn your guts like a meal of habanero poppers and booze. Few noirists understand the human condition so well and needs so few variables to push your buttons.
The narrator finds his brother Danny one day, parked in front of his trailer in their father's busted up muscle car, soaked in blood. Haunted by memories of his old man ordering him to take care of his brother, the narrator obliges while trying to piece back what happened to Danny. As his brother wakes up, they engage in awkward discussion where Danny doesn't answer to what he did, but instead tells the narrator why he behaves in such an irresponsible manner at times. The two brothers live a completely different lifestyle and yet, they are jealous of each other. Danny has done something stupid while binging and the narrator juggles between his blood obligations and his heart's desires as to know how he'll handle it.
When I interviewed him, Tom Piccirilli discussed how family was a subject of fascination to him. ALL YOU DESPISE is a study of brotherly bonds, heredity and childhood trauma. What's going on here is subtle and differentiates ALL YOU DESPISE from your beat-up family story where siblings accuse each other of responsibility for their failures in dinners where they flick food and tension-filled quips at each other. The father's ghost is looming all over this novella. Through the narrator's memories, but also through Danny's reckless behavior. He is caught between his father's dogma and the person he's grown to be and eventually left behind because of past tragedy. So he's caught in an emotional gray zone where personal drama, family loyalties and his moral compass intertwines.
I listened as my old man commented on the state of decay of the world as his eyes fogged with memory. His nostalgia made his voice calm and affectionate. He spoke of when the roads broke through empty acreage, potato fields, and miles of pine barrens. We covered miles and lifetimes.
Aesthetic purists will also find something to like about ALL YOU DESPISE and Tom Piccirilli's fiction in general. Few can craft rich and deep sentences like he does. He chains words together with inimitable flow and I'm not saying it in a Marcel Proust I-molest-punctuation kind of way. All his words carry part of his sentences' weight and there is nothing I like better in reading that this particular balance. Spare prose, childhood haunting and unhealthy sense of duty make ALL YOU DESPISE a special novella in that very way Tom Piccirilli is special. He is a writer of tremendous consistency, with the highest quality of standards. If the fact that a hundred-books-a-year reviewer keeps finding time to read and discuss his fiction doesn't convince you of doing the same, I don't know what will. Your mistake. I have four or five of his books in TBR already and more will come.
FOUR STARS