Rating: 
Summary: Unsettling and disturbing
Review: This one got under my skin. A very unsettling mystery about the forces that lie just under the facade of a normal college setting. The story weaves a powerful and subtle spell as a young man searches through the dark corridors of his university trying to find the truth behind the death of a murdered girl. He's haunted both psychologically and by the ghost of his sister, whose own death has somehow left him with the curse of stigmata. This is a strange, fascinating study on the mental breakdown and moral buildup of a man so terrified to face the outside world that he's willing to find the worst and deepest evils within his college life.
Rating:
Summary: Modern noir the way you like it!
Review: Tom Piccirilli is an author I've become familiar with through his short stories in various magazines and anthologies like THE DARKER SIDE and BAD NEWS. He certainly doesn't dissapoint in his latest novel THE NIGHT CLASS, a genuinely creepy and insightful noir story that reads like a throwback to 50s harder boiled fare. The plot is an amazing thrill ride from page one all the way to the end, constant suspense draped with powerful atmosphere. What's even more incredible is that all of this takes place in one setting during one 24 hour period. This is a truly effective read. I read this book in two lengthy sittings, and you'll wind up doing the same because it's that difficult to put down. Authentic and flawed, the characters that populate the novel are extremely human, even our villains. The ending is a light-speed suspenseful showdown with so many twists and turns you'll be shaken and stirred down to your spine. Highest recommendation!
Rating:
Summary: Incredible macabre supernatural mystery
Review: Tom Piccirilli is one of the few current practitioners of truly atmospheric horror: horror fiction that takes place with a milieu so finely-honed it taps at the back of your neck like a chilly blade. In THE NIGHT CLASS, he tackles the tale of a young man who returns to his campus after winter vacation to discover a girl has been murdered in his bed. As he attempts to solve the crime, we learn that he suffers from stigmata, where his hands bleed whenever someone at the school dies. As his hands bleed more and more as he hunts the trail of killings across the university, he gains a greater education than he'd ever hoped for. It's a complex plot with some of the most offbeat and bizarre scenes I've read in years. A spooky, startling novel that will keep you glued to your seat until you finally finish the course.
Rating:
Summary: A classic mixture
Review: Tom Piccirilli is one of the most consistently innovative horror writers currently working in the industry. All of his novels manage to raise the bar another notch and each one is completely unique and wholly different from the next. The Night Class has touches of the supernatural that are perfectly intertwined with a story that is, at its core, a mystery that leads the hero through his own dark night of the soul. The fact that the entire book takes place in a single night proves how well Piccirilli manages to frame his story within the context of his own subtle symbolism. This is a thriller that takes place on a university campus where a murder has occurred, but really it's the tale of one man's journey through a night of madness where everything he's come to believe is shaken and corrupted. A brilliant literary event.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Scenes but Problematic Structure
Review: Tom Piccirilli's "The Night Class," set in a university, begins with that age-old problem of every student who has ever walked through the hollowed halls of academia. Caleb Prentiss sits sulking in his 8:00 AM philosophy class watching Professor Yokver make a fool out of himself yet again. A majority of the students in Yok's class seem to enjoy the back flips, the nonsense chatter, and the idea that motion does not exist in a philosophical sense. But Cal finds it taxing in the extreme, especially when he wants nothing more than to idle away his hours in front of the television set or to spend time with girlfriend Jodi (who sits in Yokver's class as well) and his small group of friends. Predictably, the professor recognizes Cal's impatience and disdain for his class, often targeting Cal for special attention. On this fine morning Cal will have nothing of the sort, and he finally stands up to the professor, tells him off, and storms out of the class for the final time with only marginal concern about the consequences such an action will have on his GPA. Cal does have other concerns than a nutty philosophy class. Jodi plans on enrolling in medical school where she hopes her lifelong love of learning will finally pay off. Cal isn't sure where he fits into her plans, but he recognizes her desire to escape a trailer trash background as he struggles with his own sense of ineptness. Cal's emotional state is further imperiled by the tenuous relationship between his friends Willy and Rose. But the real clincher comes when Cal realizes a murder took place in his room over the Christmas break. He begins to obsess over the identity of this young woman (named Sylvia Campbell), tracking down information about the crime from two sadistic campus security guards and locating her possessions stored in a building on the university grounds. As Cal's infatuation with the mysterious Sylvia grows, more questions than answers arise. Whose is Sylvia and why is her background so shrouded in mystery? Why do none of his friends realize a murder took place in his room? What role does the university play in the homicide? As Cal begins to write his senior thesis on this sad incident, his own sense of self and his relationships start to crumble. "The Night Class" is not a conventional horror story. To begin with, there is little in the way of gore or overt scares found here. Piccirilli decides to take a cerebral tack instead, spending most of the story outlining Cal's psychological state and his troubled relations with other people. We discover that Cal has many problems, that he is a binge drinker who obsesses over witnessing the suicide of his sister many years before. He also has a problem of getting stigmata on his hands when someone close to him dies. Cryptic clues about where the story is going appear from time to time, such as references to Cal's eerie "acceptability" to the faculty and university. The reader is left in the dark about what all of this means until the end of the story, when the author rips down the curtains and we learn this is a tale about illusions and power, about how those individuals who hold real power in society and how they abuse authority. In this case, it is university administrators and professors who make or break students seeking entry into the professional world. Professors have the power of grades over their pupils, but in Piccirilli's world the power of grades also leads to the coercion of sexual favors from dedicated students. "The Night Class" as a novel does not work as well as it could. The whole book resembles a series of scenes rather than a unified novel, and a reader quickly gets bogged down in the details without knowing where exactly this whole thing is going. Even the ending is a bit of a letdown, as Cal learns the real nature of what his university is about and tries to put a stop to the shenanigans. The idea of paying any price to gain admittance to the top tiers of society is a good one, but its execution suffers in "The Night Class." What does work well is the author's ability to construct a gripping scene. Arguably the best example of this talent concerns Cal's adventure to the strip club where his friend Willy spends most of his time. Cal not only visits with Willy, but also notices a girl he had a crush on from school is part of the stage show. Through pages of minute description, Piccirilli manages to convey the atmospheric tensions of such a place, the dynamic between the promise of beauty and the seedy nature of this profession. This scene also imparts an important clue to the story when Cal sees beyond the façade of his college crush, seeing the scars of injury and drug use underneath the makeup and suggestive outfit. In other words, there is corruption behind the face presented to the public. The university is the same way. It is many of these carefully crafted scenes that makes the book worth reading. Tom Piccirilli won a Bram Stoker Award for this novel in 2002, but I felt as though the author was merely doodling his way through the book. A better structured novel with sufficient sign posts along the way so the reader knows where he or she is heading would make a more interesting read. Piccirilli can write, of that there is no doubt, but his organizational skills in "The Night Class" are sorely lacking.
Rating:
Summary: Daring and literate horror
Review: Tom Piccirilli's The Night Class is a daring and original literary novel that concerns itself more with existential questions on life and the world than with boogeymen in the closet. In the opening pages we meet a university professor who constantly squawks at his class, "What is good? What is bad?" and therein lies the real theme for the story that follows. I had a wonderfultime reading this Bram Stoker winner for 2002 for Best Horror Novel. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, poignant, and entirely engaging.
Rating: 
Summary: Fine read, marred by editorial errors.
Review: Tom Piccirilli, The Night Class (ShadowLands Press, 2001) Tom Piccirilli, who has been working in relative obscurity since at least 1990 (Dark Father, a Bram Stoker nominee for Best First Novel, disappeared off the shelves relatively soon after and to my knowledge has never been reprinted), started getting attention again towards the end of the last decade. He pivked up two Stoker nominations in 1999, another in 2000, and then went over the top, winning the Stoker for Best Novel in 2002 with The Night Class. Which, I surmised, made it a fine place to start reading his stuff. I couldn't have been more right. He first few pages of The Night Class showed up as chapter-a-day mailings about six months ago, and I wasn't too impressed. Re-reading them as a portion of the whole book, they still have the air of "we're starting off way too slow for a book that's barely two hundred fifty pages, and that's with the illustrations!", but in the general scheme of things, that's not necessarily bad. The book never really increases in pace, but the plot here (and the underlying mystery) are far less central points in the novel than is the building of the main character, Caleb Prentiss. Caleb, a senior at an unnamed university somewhere (though I don't think it's ever actually mentioned, I got the distinct feeling it's in a rural area just outside the suburbs of Chicago; don't ask me why), returns from a very bad Christmas break to discover that a girl named Sylvia Campbell, who was staying in his room while taking a class during that time, was murdered there. He becomes fascinated with finding out who she is after discovering her name and address were faked for the transcripts. In doing so, he also tries to work out the old demons of watching his sister kill herself when he was still a kid. There's a lot going on here, including various subplots with his girlfriend, his best friend and HIS grilfriend, Fruggy Fred (a late-night radio DJ and the book's token mystic), a mysterious girl from his Ethics class who's obviously attracted to him, and another from the same class he's attracted to who doesn't care that he exists, etc. In other words, your basic stew of college life, except that there's a murder involved. Perhaps that's what's best about it; Piccirilli does a fantastic job of using the murder, and the underlying metaphors of it (all of which lead to a rather predictable ending, truth be told), as a great parallel to the normal, everyday chaos that is life at the collegiate level. (Obviously, either Piccirilli or someone very close to him didn't enjoy college nearly as much as I did, but then they probably didn't spend those four years drunk to the point of oblivion, either.) Because of this, the various plot elements fading into the background didn't bother me in the least, and neither did their overly-quick resolutions in the final few pages (and the loose ends left untied; the ending of The Night Class is as simultaneously frustrating and satisfying as the end of Jack Martin's Videodrome). I was too busy being impressed by Piccirilli's quiet authority, his refusal to bow to the usual horror conventions and willingness to spit in a few faces in that regard, and more than anything his ability to keep the first section of the book, which bounces around in time like a superball in a rubber room, coherent. The reviews already posted on Amazon make me think that perhaps fans of more conventional horror novels will like this a lot better than I think they will. I can guarantee those who like more eclectic, existential horror (Robbe-Grillet or Dalton Trumbo, for example) will definitely get a charge out of The Night Class. Gets a point off for really sloppy editing (way above an acceptable number of typos, especially towards the end). ****
Rating:
Summary: The Night Class = education in terror!
Review: When I was in college I always KNEW that something creepy was going on int hose hallowed halls at night. In Piccirilli's novel, he gives us a glimpse into the bizarre society that takes charge of our children's futures when we least expect it to be happening. THE NIGHT CLASS shows how some students are educated in the real torments of the world and graduate long before they're ever handed a diploma. This is a first-rate thriller, filled with suspense, oddness, a terrific fantasy-like moments that lend it a horrifying atmosphere you'll never forget!
| 
