Reading them one is instantly hit by a feeling of a very unusual atmosphere and style. Piccirilli writes his stories as eerie, poignant dreamy miasmas. I find it hard to even begin to express this atmosphere in words. A sort of singing pain – a delicately fractured lens gazing through mist. Painfully forlorn, sometimes very erotic, quirkily off-kilter, vividly hallucinatory. A sort of hybrid between mad adolescent dreaming and a hoary American Villager out of his head on something extremely illegal! Indeed it is works like this that demonstrate clearly enough that even the label of ‘horror’ is practically impossible to define. Reading Piccirilli I am reminded perhaps more of the visionary mainstream writers like Italo Calvino or Borges – or perhaps even J G Ballard. And yet all this is seen through an extraordinary veneer of traditions and psychological symbols that could only happen with something that is very firmly rooted in horror writing. This is horror writing at its most cutting edge! These are not just tales of Vampires or psychos. These are not just depressing ‘lets look at the atrocities that humans can do’ or ‘oh dear look what a horrible world it is’ stories and other tired old horrors. This is a horror writer doing what a horror writer should – probing deep into the mind, tasting it at many levels. And also he is finding his own extremely individual style, paying respect to and referencing tradition where it is needed but not being chained to it.