Rating: 
Summary: A weird chiller
Review: After recently finishing up Piccirilli's The Night Class I ordered this one to see how he'd use his talent for mood and literary originality to use on a southern town. And boy, did he go all out! A Choir of Ill Children is my favorite novel of the year so far, with bizarre situations and characters drawn to perfection by a master of dark fantasy. He merges genres so that you have the black comedy side by side with poignant scenes of loss and redemption. A feast for the reader's imagination!
Rating:
Summary: A rare and wonderful book!
Review: As a whole, southern gothic stories have never appealed much to me. A few exceptions are Douglas Clegg's Neverland and Robert McCammon's Gone South. Tom Piccirilli's forthcoming Bantam Books release, A Choir Of Ill Children, not only made the exceptions list, but quickly catapulted to my favorites list. Tom Piccirilli has yet to disappoint me, and this is "Pic" at his best. Choir's players are striking and sympathetic. I feel like I know them, and like them or not, I feel for them. Piccirilli's language is poetic, grim, so fluid you could drown in it. Which is just what I did. And I will do it again. Writers do not just have fans, they earn them. Tom Piccirilli has earned a lifelong fan in me. Tom Piccirilli's A Choir Of Ill Children is a rare and wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: "We are a family. This is blood."
Review: As one reads A Choir Of Ill Children (peruses might be a better word, for like Thomas, the reader is always drawn back to the past) one comes to understand that horror, and the horrible, are two different things. As such this book uses the horrible to achieve its goals. Three brothers joined at the head, fates or furies as the case might be. A serial dog kicker haunts the night. A one-legged child-killer lurks, his victim a harbinger of change. And swamp witches sacrifice themselves piece by piece to stave of karma. These images are horrible, and horribly funny at the same time.
Picirilli's storytelling rides roughshod over the reader as Thomas faces a past that lives with him in an old mansion in Kingdom Come. It follows him about as he visits the stations of his own personal cross - a bar, his factory, an altar in the swamp, an empty church. The shift from external quest to the internal seeking that is its cognate is subtle. Is Thomas intent on standing still or moving on? Will there be an end, or a new beginning? I think that these may be the real questions.
Everything, sleeping and awake, seems full of signs and portents. Piccirilli intentionally overloads the textual messages, but underlying the almost symphonic interplay of key phrases and themes is a Thomas whose sense of belonging is what gets him through his challenges. He is a family looking for a way to happen, and if he can just find the right key he can put everything back together his way.
There are some stunning moments in this book when Piccirilli displays his poetic abilities in his sensitivity to language and its movement. The last paragraph of the book is one of those strangely perfect pieces of prose that will haunt you, but there are many others. This is horror in the service of literature, intended to take the reader somewhere and managing to do exactly that. Pay attention - "Our illusions have muscle and meaning."
Rating: 
Summary: Odd but good
Review: I'd unknowingly stepped into a world so foreign (yet strangely familiar) and disturbing that for at least ten pages into three-time Bram Stoker award-winning author Tom Piccirilli's A Choir of Ill Children, I was totally disoriented. I didn't know how to process it mentally, and to me that's a definite sign of a brilliant author at work. This story of Thomas and his three conjoined-triplet brothers starts out strange and then gets really weird. I love that in a book -- challenge my perceptions.
There are different kinds of horror fiction and each one has its own proponents. There is the horror of fear, where the likelihood of people being harmed is high; the horror of action, where the excape from a perceived harm is the main component; and the horror of the weird, where characters and events are so strange and unfamiliar that the natural response is to be afraid of them (the main reason why Tod Browning's Freaks is considered a horror film, and indeed a carnival geek plays a pivotal role in this novel). A Choir of Ill Children belongs firmly in the last camp. In fact, I was wondering if Piccirilli (whose The Night Class won 2002's Stoker for Best Novel) was trying to make things as odd as possible or if the characters in his own brand of Southern gothic appeared in his mind fully-formed.
A motley crew of characters populate the town of Kingdom Come, including a couple of women who are competing for the affection of the tragic triplets. (Piccirilli gives the three brothers oddly conflicting personality traits, and then ironically has them share the power of speech.) Also in attendance is Drabs Bibble, son of the local reverend (and a minister himself -- he presided over Thomas's marriage) who speaks in tongues following a breakdown (connected to an unrequited love for Thomas's wife), and spends a lot of time publicly nude. (The often-nude son of an important member of the community is right out of Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son, but Piccirilli somehow makes it, along with everything else in the rest of A Choir of Ill Children, feel completely original.)
Adding to the proceedings are two concurrent investigations taking place in town: one for information regarding the attempted murder of a regressed teenage girl, and the other for the town's resident dog kicker, based merely on boot size. The author's lyrical style (Piccirilli is also an award-winning poet) makes it hard to tell dreams from reality, making the reader's perceptions even more difficult to discern. But the emotional heft of the storyline -- the weight of blood ties and the consequences and importance of history -- do a lot to pull the reader along in a story filled with visions of all-days suckers and oxtail soup and a lesson on the cleansing power of lightning. A Choir of Ill Children is a one-of-a-kind novel that won't appeal to everyone, but should be read by fans of literarily-bent genre fiction that don't mind an assortment of oddities. It's really weird, but it's really good.
Rating:
Summary: Stoker for Piccirilli
Review: Never has a book by Tom Piccirilli come together more beautifully. His characters, his prose, and his story are captivating from beginning to end. Tom definitely deserves a Bram Stoker award for this, or at the very least, a nomination. I can't tell you how great a writer Tom is and I urge you to give A Choir Of Ill Children a try. Disturbing and beautiful at the same time, this novel pushes open the bountries of modern horror fiction and gives the genre more legitimacy than ever.
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Summary: Intelligent, dark southern gothic
Review: Strong, believable but bizarre characters populate this weird and wonderful tale of a southern town haunted by swamp ghosts and granny witches. Piccirilli's prose is extremely powerful and often so beautiful that it sounds like music, grabbing us and dancing us along to its strange choir. One of the best literary dark fantasies I've read in recent years and bound to eventually be considered a classic by fans of the field.
Rating:
Summary: Lush and atmospheric horror
Review: There's often been discussions about the "beauty of the dark", and here in Tom Pic's novel A Choir of Ill Children you'll find gorgeous wonders abounding. The lush southern atmosphere will have you dripping sweat as you make your way through the haunted swamps and backwoods of this book. There are hex women, a down on his luck private eye, ghosts, killers, and plenty of haunted and doomed characters. Despite how horrific this might sound, the story is actually quite darkly humorous, which adds a whole new level of eerieness to the plot. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and beautiful
Review: This book was nothing like what I was expecting, but it was beautiful, lyrical, and fascinating.
The narrator radiates themes of loneliness, belonging, family, love and desire. His family history and past hurts have rendered him amoral, while capable of deep, hurtful love. Nothing is what it seems as he struggles to understand how he came to be where he is - a journey that started three generations ago and into which he has only recently stepped.
This book asks, Are monsters born or made? It's an amazing read, making you think throughout. It leaves you to find your own answers on such weighty issues. Nothing about this book is black and white, or easy, but the journey is well worth it. It'll change the way you think. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A Choir of Ill Children
Review: This book was wonderfully written. Great cover art. Unusual charectors. But, in the end I felt slightly cheated. The storm was over but I didn't feel the lead had changed much. He found out many things about his past yet it didn't effect his future. The book is still amazing and worth rereading.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of the macbre
Review: This is an incredibly important piece of literary horror that all true fans of dark fantasy and speculatve fiction should be on the lookout for. Piccirilli pulls together and entwines a number of dark genre elements to give us a terrific (and terrifying) novel of small town evils filtered through an eye of normality. This is the type of effectve, brooding, literate work that is populated by characters so bizarre and yet authentic that it reads like a non-fiction tale of murder, vengeance, and swamp water superstition and magic. This is as luscious, delicious, freakish, and gripping as the works of Harry Crews or Flannery O'Connor. Go now and enjoy!
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