Order THE NIGHT CLASS here
(also reviewed)
Order FUCKIN' LIE DOWN ALREADY here
Order NIGHTJACK here
Order ALL YOU DESPISE here
Order LOSS here
Order EVERY SHALLOW CUT here
Order CLOWN IN THE MOONLIGHT here
Order THE LAST KIND WORDS here
Order THE LAST WHISPER IN THE DARK here
Order THE WALLS OF THE CASTLE here
Sanity is highly subjective. Like anything human, it's flawed and malleable, resting but not always sleeping, quiet in coma but never silent, and always altering.
I remember having a hard time imagining my life after high school. College is such a big change and it's not everyone who can handle it. It's less the orgy of booze and promiscuous women depicted in Hollywood movies and more like the first part of Pantera's Psycho Holiday's chorus: "Now I'm far from home/Spending time alone/It's time to set my demons free." In hindsight of my own college experience, I was curious of the treatment one of my favourite authors Tom Piccirilli gave it in THE NIGHT CLASS, his Bram Stoker Award winning novel. Turned out college was just a Byzantine backdrop for something far more ambitious, if maybe a bit flawed.
Caleb Prentiss is a smart, restless college student who feels like his Academic life is going in circles. He's nursing an alcohol issue and an increasingly more difficult relationship with his disciplined girlfriend Jodi. After coming back from Christmas break, he learns that a female student named Sylvia Campbell has been slaughtered in his dorm room during his absence. The gruesome murder will breathe a new life in Caleb, who's looking to uncover the truth by any means necessary. But the closer he gets to the truth about the death of Sylvia Campbell, the more the fabric of his reality is starting to come undone.
I've read (and reviewed) several Tom Piccirilli novels before, but THE NIGHT CLASS was written three years earlier than anything I've read of him before and honestly, it's quite different. I've never quite read anything like it, but it reminded me of White Wolf's World of Darkness universe, where our reality is just a layer hiding the true nature of things. Piccirilli, in his typical cleverness, used college as a Byzantine, Kafkaesque backdrop in order to illustrate the thin nature of reality in bureaucracy. The further Caleb is walking down the dark corridors of his higher learning institution, the clearer he can see beyond the thin veil of bureaucratic self-importance. There is an unspeakable truth beyond the meaningless tasks college staff do each day.
"It's real," said Fruggy Fred in his sleep.
"What is?"
"The place."
"Which?"
"Hell," Fruggy said. By the end of the song he'd added, "Heaven. Death."
If, like me, you're used to Tom Piccirilli's more recent work, you'll notice that he improved tremendously over the 15 years since THE NIGHT CLASS was published and that Caleb Prentiss is a little weak, compared to his later protagonists such as Terrier Rand. It seems like back then, Piccirilli's novels were less character driven and that he hadn't yet developed his knack for more introspective work. THE NIGHT CLASS is fun because it feels like an early 1990s horror movie come to life, but it's a little hard to follow at times and it isn't much of a visceral experience, which Piccirilli's later work is. I do think that part of these issues stem from the protagonist not being well-defined. Caleb Prentiss is just about the only variable in THE NIGHT CLASS that isn't so.
So here's the kicker; if you're getting into THE NIGHT CLASS and expecting a typical Tom Piccirilli experience, you're going to be disappointed. I've read 10 books of his and it's unlike anything I know of him, but the good thing is that it is unlike anything I know in literature. I'm not the most well-read in horror, but the Edgar Allan Poe meets World of Darkness meets FLATLINERS is kind of a Bushido Danger Zone of Originality to me. So yeah, don't get into THE NIGHT CLASS thinking it's going to be a landmark Tom Piccirilli novel, think about it as a novel that explore the boundaries between supernatural horrror and gore, and that ultimately closes the gap between them. Not my favourite Piccirilli novel, but kind a unique, inimitable object. I'm sure he couldn't write anything even remotely similar today. A fun, disorienting experience. Not what you might expect.