Order NIGHTJACK here
If you said the term ''civil rights'' enough times you can break down anybody working in a state-run facility.
Tom Piccirilli is a cult author. He is not exactly a best-seller, but he is a four-time Bram Stoker Award winner, an Edgar Award finalist and his fanbase is small, yet rabid and evangelical. I am less familiar with Piccirilli's horror cannon, but novels like NIGHTJACK bridge the gap between horror, crime and mystery with vision and energy. It's been said that truly great novels don't belong to one genre and in this case the saying is true. NIGHTJACK is a labyrinth of a novel, but it's written with a contagious energy and an attention to detail that is rare to narratives about mental illness.
Pace was just released from the Grand Falls mental hospital. While walking to the train station with his treating doctor, on his way to a halfway house, he is kidnapped by three madmen : Hayden, Faust and Pia. Pace is heavily medicated, his mind is floating in ether and what the madmen say doesn't quite make much sense: They're talking about the past, about a man named Jack and about things that are left to be done. Dr. Brandt calls him Will and awakes other memories buried under layers of powerful medication. Pace stops taking his pills and awakes to the hypercomplex being he once was. That decision to put his precarious mental health at sake will be his best friend and worst enemy along the way. Because there is an important mission to be accomplished indeed.
NIGHTJACK goes so deep into the wounded psyche of the mentally ill, it becomes one of its strengths. Usually, the crazy person is the odd man out in fiction, but here, they make the fabric of the story and boy, do they ever live in a scary world. The feverish narrative blends the realities of lead characters at such an impossible pace, it transforms what would have been a grim and violent road novel into an epic journey of the disenfranchised and the damned. The reality shift can get pretty confusing at times, especially that it's a variable that increases as Pace's health keeps deterioriating and he gets more confused, but if you keep up with it, the payoff is worth the investment.
''How are you doing, Will?'' she asked.
All the nutjobs on the ward always said fine because they didn't have the wit to say anything else. The candor had been burned out of them with primal scream therapy. Three in the morning and these idiots are practicing their prehistoric shrieks, regressing back to cavemen.
I thought the book could get a little linear, if you removed the gradually increasing reality shifts from the equation. Maybe it was by design. Maybe Tom Piccirilli didn't want the book to become overly complex, so he designed the main narrative as some sort of highway the reader could always anchor itself to, no matter how complex the detours were. It bugged me a little, because the book doesn't start like this and has, at first, these intriguing flashbacks of therapy sessions with Dr. Brandt. Maybe that's why I had this grudging relationship to the reality shifts. They were fascinating, but they dripped over another story that seemed equally fascinating.
Any author looking to write fiction about mental diseases should make NIGHTJACK a mandatory stop. It expanded my perception of what it must be to live with such a burden on your soul. It's written with such relentless energy, such feverish mania that it's a strangely uplifting experience to read. Tom Piccirilli never writes a boring novel. That's how he earned his cult status. NIGHTJACK might not stand out like his later novels do, but it's another achievement of boldness and imagination. It's an adrenaline-fueled narrative stunt with sharp fangs.