Tom Piccirilli, November Mourns

November Mourns

Tom Piccirilli

Bantam, June 2005, $5.99, 388 pp.

ISBN 055358720X

After beating and near killing Zeke Hester for trying to rape his fifteen year old sister Megan, Shad Jenkins is sent up to state prison for two years. While in prison, he takes college courses and teaches another convict how to read. Just before he is due to be released, his father informs him that his sister is dead, found on Gospel Road, only a mark on her cheek and no idea how she died.

When Shad is released he returns to Moon Run Hollow with its ignorant back woods folk where incest is common and nobody ever speaks of the children born of such a union. Shad is determined to figure out who killed his sister. He visits a congregation of snake handlers who live nearest to the place where Megan died. When he returns to the Hollow he confronts the last person he would ever expect to have killed his innocent sister and realizes no one is sane in the Hollow.

The protagonist night walks and doesn't remember what he does when that happens. He also sees the shade of his sister's hand and a convict from the prison he stayed at. Is he hallucinating, going insane or has he come to realize that the natural laws don't apply inside the Hollow? Tom Piccirilli writes a dark foreboding gothic like tale in which readers sense that Shad is on the road to his own destiny if he can remain on the path. The lyrical prose and the noir atmosphere makes NOVEMBER MOURNS a memorable work.

Harriet Klausner