Showing results by author "Tom Piccirilli" in All Categories

Hellboy comes to a crossroads in Enigma, Georgia, a small town beset by strange occurrences. Sent to keep an eye on Sarah Nail, a young girl hiding from the curse of her family, he becomes entangled in the blood debt of evil mystical preacher Brother Jester. Stuck between human malice and the mysteries of the occult, Hellboy comes up against an intrigue of ghosts, demon trees, talking bullfrogs, and a race of lost mutant children.

The college winter break is over, and Cal Prentiss faces yet another semester of boring classes. But Cal's boredom is shattered when he discovers evidence of an unspeakable murder that occurred in his dorm room over the break. Obsessed with finding the truth about this gruesome crime, Cal travels further and further down the twisting halls of a university suddenly gone mad.

Chase is a performance poet with a history of mental illness who's spent time in jail and hospitals while trying to deal with traumas from his past. A cult figure in New York City, he's as well known for his mania as he is for his poetry. During a reading, Chase sees a woman he believed had died on the ward due to the cruelty of a brutal guard - is she a hallucination, a ghost, or a killer who faked her own murder?

Cryer once had another name, but he can't remember it. The man he used to be was stabbed in the head by an assailant. After months of catatonia, Cryer awakens in a mental facility to find that his former life is almost completely forgotten. He knows his wife and daughter have been murdered - he saw them die moments before his own assault - but his shattered mind is incapable of retaining their names. Or even his own.

Matthew Galen came back home to Summerfell for a reason. Not to visit his family. Not to relive childhood memories. No, he came back because his best friend was in a hospital for the criminally insane - for crimes too unspeakable to believe. But Matthew knows the terrifying truth. The ultimate evil doesn't reside in his friend's twisted soul. It comes from a far darker place, a place only Matthew knows. And only Matthew can stop the evil - if he dares.

After the break-up of his latest relationship, Nathaniel Follows meets beautiful, wealthy, and melancholy Susan Hartford; their rapport is immediate. She invites him to her home for a grandiose birthday celebration, and Nathaniel finds that Susan's life is not as enviable as it seems - in the midst of the gathering he realizes there is a wall of fear around her, and that her self-deprecation has a decidedly violent streak.

The Last Deep Breath follows Grey, a drifter on the search for his foster sister, who showed up for the first time in 10 years with a knife in her side, then vanished without a trace. Grey winds up in Los Angeles, dealing with manipulative actresses and scummy agents, hoping to find some clue as to what happened to her after she dropped out of a porn career he didn't know about.

After his brutally violent cop father kills his mother in a heinous fashion on Christmas day, a young boy is raised on the streets of Brooklyn to become the deadliest hitman for the Mob. But even while he carves out a life and reputation for himself dispatching enemies of the syndicate, the hitter is planning his revenge against those who helped to make him what he is. From the cruel mob family to his own murderous old man, who sends threats and taunts from the safety of his jail cell.

Something is calling Jacob Maelstrom back to the isolated home of his childhood - to the scene of a living nightmare that almost cost him his life. Ten years ago his sister slaughtered their brother and parents, locked Jacob in a closet...then committed a hideous suicide. Now, as the anniversary of that dark night approaches, Jacob is drawn back to a house where the line between the living and the dead is constantly shifting.

When a nameless man awakens to find his blood-spattered brother passed out in his trailer it sets off a chain of painful, hard-hitting events that tests family loyalty and shows the savage impact of a father's dark legacy.

Crease is going back to his quaint, quiet hometown of Hangtree. It's where his father, the sheriff, met ruin in the face of a scandal involving the death of a kidnapped little girl and her missing ransom. It's where Crease was beaten, jailed, and kicked clear of the town line 10 years earlier.

Pentacle collects the classic tales of an unnamed Necromancer and his demonic familiar "Self" as they wander the spectral highways of America incurring the wrath of both heaven and hell.

Loss concerns a failed writer working as a handyman in an old Manhattan apartment building with a strange history and numerous oddball tenants, not all of whom may be what they seem. The penthouse is owned by a bestselling novelist and his wife, the nameless narrator's longtime unrequited love, who soon goes missing. Is she dead or somehow trapped within the endless corridors of a lair full of twisted memories and half-forgotten ambitions?

Jonathan Kendrick's grandmother lives in the upstate New York village of Felicity Grove. And whenever something of a criminal nature occurs, Grandma Anna is right in the thick of it. This time, the senior sleuth needs Jonathan's help to clear an innocent man's name. Zebediah Crummler, the cemetery caretaker, has been arrested for killing a member of the powerful Harnes family.... Because of his childlike nature, Crummler is placed in an asylum, where his inconsistent tales and ramblings prove difficult for Jonathan and Anna to decipher. But they must be careful.

Twenty years of repressed anger and memories. A bitter knot of hatred that binds and divides two friends. The dark secret that fuels and devastates them both. Eddie's doing his best to get by, but every day the good fight just gets harder. And now there's a new burden to shoulder. Gray - his best friend and nemesis in literature, romance, and life - has landed in a bizarre mental hospital, known for its radical treatments, because Gray couldn't bear the weight of an unspeakable trauma.

Futile Efforts features nearly 500 pages of Tom Piccirilli's unique blend of intense and provocative writing. Includes the stories "Alchemy" - "Voice C" - "An Average Insanity, a Common Agony" - "Around it Still the Sumac Grows" - "With Eyes Averted" - "Shadder" - "Making Faces" - "Thief of Golgotha" - "These Strange Lays" - "Two in the Eyes" - "Tortures of that Inward" - "Traveling" - "Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless" - "Jonah Arose" - and continues with 45 of the author's most acclaimed poems.

Her name was Crimson...and she was a legend. A beautiful pirate queen who plundered the 16th Century Caribbean sea by day and confronted voodoo and vampires during the steaming tropical nights.

Welcome to Felicity Grove.... This upstate New York village is as small as it is peaceful. But somehow, Jonathan Kendrick's eccentric grandma, Anna, always manages to find trouble. Crime, scandal, you name it...this wheel-chair-bound senior citizen is involved. So, when the phone rings at four a. m. in Jonathan's New York City apartment, he knows to expect some kind of dilemma. But Anna's outdone herself this time. She's stumbled across a dead body in her trash can.

On the day of his release from a mental institution, Pace is taken "hostage" by Faust, Pia, and Hayden, three escapees from the hospital who disappeared after the presumed rape and beating of Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of the Greek munitions tycoon Alexandra Kaltzas. Each suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, experiencing complex delusions and sometimes fantastical identities. Pace tries to piece together what happened when apparently one of their alternate personalities tried to kill Cassandra.

Priest McClaren wants to put his past behind him. It's a past filled with loss, murder... and revenge. Now all Priest wants is to own a carpentry shop and earn a quiet living building coffins. But it looks like peace and quiet just aren't in Priest's future. His ex-lover has pleaded with him to carry ransom money into hostile territory in Mexico, to rescue her new husband.