When I started reading horror fiction seriously, with an eye towards writing it myself, I spent a small fortune buying a lot of small press and mass market horror novels, largely to put prose to names. I read a lot of crap.

The novel that snapped me out of my Reader's Morass was A Choir of Ill Children, a "southern gothic" by Tom Piccirilli, which struck me as the literary equivalent of David Lynch's ERASERHEAD--dark, beautiful, lyrical, and grotesque. To this day it remains one of my favorite novels.

Pic writes horror. Pic writes westerns. Pic writes hardboiled crime dramas. Like Dan Simmons, Pic writes everything that he writes well.

So it was with great anticipation that I read Pic's novella Frayed, published by Creeping Hemlock Press--my "pick" as the Best Novella of 2007. I read fewer novellas than I do novels. Horror novellas are generally published by specialty publishers--Biting Dog, Creeping Hemlock, Necessary Evil--and while I can rationalize spending $40 or $50 on a Limited Edition novel, I can rarely assign those same dollar figures to a work running 100 pages or less. My hat is off to our most prolific reviewer, Norman Rubenstein, who buys everything. Keep the small press economy going, Norman!
I ordered Frayed because I was in the mood for something wonderful, and the idea of Pic writing a story about two friends suffering guilt after they murder an angel was too tempting to resist. I also have absolute faith in Creeping Hemlock, which recently released Piccirilli's Fever Kill and has Brian Keene's Jack's Magic Beans in the pipeline.
I usually dislike horror stories in which the main character is an author--boooooring!--and both the main characters in Frayed are authors. But Pic uses this as a springboard to explore the relationship between creativity and madness. This beautifully written tale brought to mind different aspects of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, SLEUTH, and THE WICKER MAN. When two great minds belonging to two great friends go to war over psychological creative property rights, who will win, the sane or the insane? And who's to say which one is which?

I can't say this novella took me any place I didn't expect to go, because it was so original and offbeat from page one that I knew better than to have expectations. Still, I was surprised by the affection I developed for both characters. It isn't often that I close a horror book--even the best written ones--with a smile on my face.