Tom Piccirilli is a name that I’m reasonably confident anyone who might check out this blog is already familiar with. So, I’ll skip the usual rundown and keep it simple: Pic kicks ass, and you all should be in on the pre-order action for his new novel The Last Kind Words.
Running up to that novel, Pic is on a blog tour, and today he is stopping off here with an essay called “Recurrence” that I believe you will find an excellent read. One day some enterprising publisher needs to do up a collection of Piccirilli essays. Maybe sooner rather than later.
And now I’ll shut up and let you get to the good stuff.
Recurrence by Tom Piccirilli
I have dreamt a dark dream of endless corridors and doors. It’s the recurring theme of my nightmares: hospitals, hotels, schools, apartment buildings, halls without number, an overwhelming sense of being lost. I am among the crowds stuck in narrow passages. Strangers mill and push and press against me. Sometimes among them are lost friends and dead family members.
We all know that our dreams are symbolic, but I think this recurrence, taken as a whole, is somehow a metaphor for my writing. My dreams are my subconscious mind continuing to write through the night. It’s that much a part of me. It won’t turn off, not even in REM, not even for a nice morning sex fantasy dream.
It makes sense. The halls are plot lines, the doors choices for how a story moves from A to B or A to P or D to Q. If you walk into one room you’re not walking into another. If you’ve made one choice you haven’t made the other. The symbols are clear but not very helpful. I’m envious of those authors who claim that they wake up with fully formed stories, and they just hop onto their desk chair and type it all out, easy as apple pie. Whatever my unconscious mind is doing, it ain’t doing that.
And it should. It should know me by now. It has the raw material for the stories, it has my memory, my fear, my hope, my horrors. Shouldn’t my brain know itself? Shouldn’t it shoulder some of the load? Why am I doing all the work while it just throws metaphor around all night long? It shows me my dead Uncle Morris wandering around my high school and I have to make sense out of that? I have to turn it into plot, into characterization? I think my subconscious has fallen down on me.
I wonder if it’s genetic. My mother used to have a recurring dream where all the dead would pull up in front of the house in a bus, and beckon her to get on board. She’d whine and mutter in her sleep in a voice that was hardly recognizable. At least that ain’t happening.
But still, it makes me wonder, what the hell is going on inside those rooms? Why am I stuck in the hallways? Why doesn’t anyone give me the keys? So I can move from suite to suite night to night. Why isn’t my mother there? What the hell has Morris got to say to me? He never talked to me when he was alive. Or hardly ever. He didn’t like me. He didn’t seem to like anybody.
Maybe tonight the hotel staff will find me. And give me keys and offer up complimentary drinks. And send up a masseuse, and show me where the hot tub and swimming pool are. And when I’m done I can check out and push past the revolving door and make it out onto the street. And the throng of foot traffic won’t be dead and won’t be related to me. And instead of a bus a taxi will pull up, and I’ll give the driver an address and we’ll pull away from the curb and into another story, fully written, with plenty of drama and action, but with something new added. A happy ending.
Tom Piccirilli is the author of more than twenty novels including SHADOW SEASON, THE COLD SPOT, THE COLDEST MILE, and A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. Learn more at: www.thecoldspot.blogspot.com
