Tom Piccirilli, RIP

I never re-read books, and I only rarely re-read shorter pieces, but two I often return to are both by Tom Piccirilli, who died today, after a second encounter with brain cancer. I was extremely pleased to publish both Fat Burglar Blues in my magazine The Big Click's inaugural issue. It showed everything that Pic was great at: a dark mood, universal empathy, and humor. He was a regular columnist until his first cancer robbed him of his abilities. Thanks to the care of his undefatigable wife Michelle Scalise and some ace medical treatment, he bounced back and gave me The Ghost Room. Read them.

When I first came onto the scene fifteen years ago, Tom Pic was The Man. Do you know what it means to be The Man? It means you're good, in a time when virtually everything and everyone was bad. It means that when your novel appears in a supposedly high-quality limited edition and the cover art literally depicts a sweaty ass, people buy it anyway and rave about the book and give it an award because it deserves one. I remember when Pic won the Bram Stoker Award—often derided as the "strokers" for the amount of log-rolling going on—for The Night Class, everyone at the ceremony was pleased and even relieved that the best book won. Kelly Laymon turned to me and said, "Pic is going to have a Stoker Village at his house." (The Stoker award is a statuette of a haunted house, called "the Usher." If you have a bunch of them, you can set them up under a Christmas tree along with a model train set for a little holiday comedy.)

And speaking personally, as someone with a Southern European surname, like Pic, and who is from the non-fancy area of Long Island, like Pic, seeing someone who is kinda like me, and excellent, and "successful" (horror writers just aren't successful) was massive. A lot is made about representation and diversity and such, and for good reasons, but "white" isn't quite the totalizing construct some would have it. When I saw shelf after shelf of Anglo names all in red or orange letters with black spines, I thought there was no place for me. Then, on the last shelf, with just a book or two on the shelves at the time, two's c's, one r, two l's. Piccirilli. (I still spell my own name out to people M-A-M-A like Mama T-as-in-Thomas A-S all the vowels are As.) And oh thank God he was good. He was friendly with my early writing friend Joi Brozek, another Long Islander. He reached out to people, not with avuncular advice or self-serving mentoring, but just good writer to good writer. He wrote fan letters to people nobody had ever heard of, which someone that good doesn't need to do for networking purposes.

Here's how good he was. A couple of years ago, I left a copy of The Coldest Mile on a bus in Seattle when Olivia and I in town for the Locus Awards. I had used my Virgin America boarding pass as a bookmark. I got a Facebook message from a stranger who found the book and said he'd like to send it back to me. It was a cheap mass market paperback, not the sort of thing anyone would miss or have a sentimental attachment to, but when this guy found the book, he started reading it, and was hooked. And he knew, because of the bookmark, that I hadn't finished and that I needed to. So he contacted me and mailed the book back to me at his own expense, then filled his Kindle with Tom Pic.

Here's how good he was. When the cancer came, a young relative of his launched an online fundraiser. She had no idea how much we loved her uncle Pic, and set the fundraiser goal to $500. It ended up being 4,823% funded.

Pic was too good for horror. He shifted, slowly but surely, to crime, often crime with a supernatural element or two. He struggled there, no longer The Man but obviously someone good enough to be The Man. He'd escaped the small, muddy, sump of Leisure paperbacks and the collector's press, sweaty asses and all, for the big time, and was struggling, but with his last couple of books he had found his footing commercially. He was too good to be dropped, too good not to give another chance with a hardcover, even in these days of Editor Spreadsheet. The Last Kind Words and The Last Whisper in the Dark were too aptly named, as along came cancer, and nearly ruin.

I don't want to overstate how close we were. We met once in person, only briefly, as in my hungry days I didn't travel much, and our email exchanges were mostly professional, only sometimes personal, but Pic was naturally just so friendly and supportive. When I started The Big Click it was really because of Pic and what he was doing. Of course he was the first writer I reached out to and the first to say yes. An instant, enthusiastic, utterly professional yes, of course I'll write you a column. He had to stop when the cancer came, but it looked like he was going to make it. He wrote me an email once, semi-shocked it seemed. While he was concentrating on his fight, two other horror writers of his generation had died suddenly. He asked me what he was still doing here.

He was being great, of course.

But cancer is pernicious. Pic was only given something like a 2 percent chance of survival the first time around, but he did it. The cancer was gone from his brain! But really, cancer is almost never gone, it is only mostly gone. There was a cold spot found in his brain again, recently, so recently that he had to announce that he was skipping the World Horror Convention where he was to be a guest of honor. That was just this spring. This morning, he died.

The world is a little colder now.