Every Shallow Cut

by Tom Piccirilli

He's nameless, faceless, and has nothing left to lose—and now he has a gun.

Alone except for his beloved bulldog, Churchill, a despondent man who's failed at his career, his marriage, and his own simple hopes makes his way across the fierce American landscape and the spectacle of his own bitter past. As he heads home to his distant brother, he witnesses various tragedies and crimes which bring out the killer in him.

Tom Piccirilli brings us a suspense story for our current struggling times, taken directly from a broken heart. It is full of realism, grit, and a depth of the dark streets that give voice to the fears most of us can barely imagine. The terror of loss, the overwhelming dread of failure, the desperate push towards crime, the horror of missed-out, mediocre dreams. And the all-too-average explosive rage.

Reviews - What's Being Said About Tom Piccirilli & Every Shallow Cut

Lovers of gritty noir will devour this stand-alone from Piccirilli (Shadow Season), a pulse-pounding account of a writer's descent into despair and violence. . . . Piccirilli makes his fall from grace utterly convincing and his emotional rage all too understandable.
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Every Shallow Cut can easily be read in 90 minutes—and it should be. Doing so makes Piccirilli’s matter-of-fact portrait of utter despair more compelling and drives home its austere beauty. Inspired by current economic hardship and possibly by his own worst nightmares, Piccirilli dedicates the book to readers who share such fears. Ninety minutes spent with Every Shallow Cut will sting for years.
–Thomas Gaughan, Booklist

With an already-impressive body of work behind him, Piccirilli delivers his greatest book yet with Every Shallow Cut. Piccirilli's prose is stripped-down and almost acoustic for this effort. Every word counts. . . and cuts. If this were music, Every Shallow Cut would sit right alongside Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, Johnny Cash's American Recordings, and Neil Young's Harvest Moon. Highly recommended.
–Brian Keene, author of The Rising

Just thinking about Every Shallow Cut makes me want to drop all my plans this evening and burn through the novella again. That’s because Tom Piccirilli writes like a man on fire. His sentences bob and weave like classic pugilists. His characters are desperate in all the right ways. Every Shallow Cut demonstrates a master of gritty poetics at the top of his game.
–Cameron Pierce

[Tom Piccirilli] is easily one of the best writers out there, his output is tremendous and I’ll be damned if he’s disappointed yet . . . I won’t sugarcoat it: [Every Shallow Cut] is a depressing read. But it’s a damn excellent one, too, and worth the open-mouthed, knee-hugging keening you’ll probably be doing after you’ve finished it.
–Ed Kurtz' Best Damn Books of 2011

Every Shallow Cut is that rare kind of psychological thriller that every other writer wishes he'd written. This is suspense at its most excruciating. Wow.
–Jonathan Maberry, NY Times Bestselling author of The Wolfman.

I just finished Every Shallow Cut a couple days ago and have got to say: Goddammit, man. After reading that, I think I’m hanging up my spurs. Or Moleskine, as it were. I can’t beat it, or really even come close. . . . Flat out, Tom, Every Shallow Cut is a thing of beauty. I could probably go on about ten other things this book does well—oh, and that’s another thing I forgot about: You did all of this in 22500 words? Really? How is that even possible?—but thinking about this has given me the itch to go write something awesome, and that’s about the best comment I could ever give.
–Nik Korpon, Spinetingler Magazine

This powerful little noirella will surely delight—and disturb.
–Paul Goat Allen, Unabashidly Bookish: the BN Community Blog

This is a tightly crafted novella that nicely captures the gloomy paranoia of the 'mancession,' recognizing both the need to stay in contact with what we love and the dead end that all fantasies of revenge represent.
–Alex Good, The Record

I love the writing here. It is stripped down to a kind of Charles Willeford-Charles Williams simplicity that is all the more effective for its bluntness and accessibility. The dialogue is dead-on....Tom Piccirilli has written many fine books and stories but at this point in his career, for me anyway, I would call Every Shallow Cut his masterpiece.
–Ed Gorman, Spur and Bram Stoker Award winning author of — The Poker Club

Just finished Every Shallow Cut by the brilliant Tom Piccirilli. A giant recommendation if you like your books short, dark, and very good.
–Sara Gran, author of Dope and Come Closer

A true master can write a genre story with the bare minimum. That's what Piccirilli has achieved with Every Shallow Cut. It's the most minimalistic, yet one of the rawest and most gut-wrenching examples of noir. It's one of those books you end up lending to friends all the time, whenever one asks: "Well, what IS noir?" Every Shallow Cut is noir in its darkest manifestation.
–Dead End Follies

Piccirilli paints a seriously bleak picture of when a life just never delivered on a promising career. This is a story of a writer who arrived at the wrong time, and the writing in it is as stark as the plot. There are some truly great lines that resonate in the mind. As short as this book is, it packs more energy than all but a few writers of today can muster.
–Bruce Grossman, Bookgasm

". . . with Every Shallow Cut, [Piccirilli]’s leap frogged both genres and has created a unique, disturbing, and utterly compulsive narrative voice which cannot be defined by genre. Each sentence is a sharply crafted gut punch keeping the reader on edge as Piccirilli’s nowhere man finally lets go of the ghost of his old life and fully embraces insanity.
–Keith Rawson, Bloody Knuckles, Calloused Fingertips

[W]e can see the immensity of what Tom has done here. Anyone can rant about the disparity in lifestyles in this country or the problems of the promises too many of us were sold over our lives. Anyone can scream that there is a problem. But within these pages, we have no choice but to live it, to breathe it in and make it a part of ourselves. It isn't so easy to ignore then.
–Anton Cancre, Shroud Magazine

Every Shallow Cut is bloody brilliant. So many emotional wallops in so few pages.
–Sarah Weinman (Los Angeles Times, Barnes & Noble Review), via — twitter

Every Shallow Cut transcends noir and its conventions. It leaps up and slaps you in the face and screams at you that maybe we’re all in deep shit, and maybe our decisions have nothing to do with it. Maybe we all have a screw quietly loosening somewhere in the darkest corners of our souls which, given the right circumstances, could eventually cause all of us to become unspooled.
–Mike Dennis

The most startlingly complete and complex character study I read this year was also one of the briefest. Piccirilli’s story of a man riding the razor’s edge all the way across the country, after losing his marriage, his home and his livelihood in one fell swoop. He loads up his car with the last of his earthly possessions and hits the road looking for his breaking point. Three travel days later in a pawn shop outside Denver, he buys a gun.
–Barnes & Noble Mystery Blog

Piccirilli is a master of the novella-length noir. Every Shallow Cut coils and tightens like a spring, giving us an image of a man for whom things can only get worse. I've been a fan of Piccirilli's work for a long time, and Every Shallow Cut delivers.
–Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

Every Shallow Cut—One of the most powerful pieces of work I've read in a long time. It's gritty, real, and has a razors edge to it that'll cut you if you aren't careful. This is Picirrilli at his best. It'll be interesting to see if Picirrilli can top Every Shallow Cut with his forthcoming 2012 titles: What Makes You Die, which Pic has already stated is in the same vein as ESC. If you like noir, and stories that don't have a happy ending, then this is your cup of tea.
–The Sci-Fi Guys Book Review Top 11 List

There was one point (I won’t mention specifics, lest I spoil the full effect) that broke me down into full out sobs.
–Anton Cancre, Horrornews.net

Sometimes we write in blood, sometimes in tears, and in Every Shallow Cut Tom Piccirilli has done both. It's a book that is profoundly moving and astonishing, his most vulnerable, shining, stunning hour.
–Ken Bruen, author of The Guards and London Boulevard

At just over a hundred and sixty pages Tom Piccirilli’s ‘noirella’ is a brilliant lament to lost hopes and unrealised dreams. It makes for a frantic and unforgiving read but if you like your noir grim and seething with barely contained currents of crushing remorse and impotent rage then Every Shallow Cut should definitely be on your next to read list.
–Crime Factory Magazine

This world feels eerily lived in, almost like Piccirilli imagined the harshest of modern, everyday tragedies befalling his own life, like he let his darkest dreads run rampant in his mind, wrote the novel with his nightmare sweat and the blood from his chewed cuticles.
–Spinetingler

Sometimes we write in blood, sometimes in tears, and in Every Shallow Cut Tom Piccirilli has done both. It's a book that is profoundly moving and astonishing, his most vulnerable, shining, stunning hour.
–The Crow's Caw

Every Shallow Cut is not so much a broken window into the battered soul of the Everyman, but a broken mirror, lined with age and ignorance, showing each and every one of us what we’re capable of—and, more specifically, so very close to becoming.
–Open Letters Monthly

Just possibly the most powerful piece of work Mr. Piccirilli has ever produced, and that's saying a lot. Dark and desperate, Every Shallow Cut is an amazing story by an amazing writer. Highly recommended.
–James A. Moore, author of Blood Red and Deeper

If you’re a misanthropic son-of-a-bitch, bitterly hopeful or just addicted to the poetry of the damned, this shit is tonic for the soul . . . . Every Shallow Cut is a new entry in a classic but too-rare form that cuts close to the bone. As such, it’s unflinchingly successful.
–Thomas Roche, Boiled Hard

It's the rare and gifted writer who can convincingly relate abject despair and be funny without diluting the impact.
–Eddie Muller, Founder and President of the Film Noir Foundation

Normally, when people get cut, blood spills from their wounds. When Tom Piccirilli gets cut, sentences pour out. I recommend picking up Every Shallow Cut and getting some of his blood in your hands.
–TT Zuma, Horror World

Every Shallow Cut is a relentless look at a nervous breakdown in progress. . . . By the end of this work, readers will probably be short of breath because of the driving pace and the brutality Piccirilli heaps upon his anti-hero, and which his anti-hero heaps upon everyone else. It’s a slow motion train wreck, and you can’t—don’t want to—look away. If you’ve never read any of Tom Piccirilli’s stuff before, this would be a terrific introduction.
–Bev Vincent, author of The Road to the Black Tower

Every Shallow Cut is not a light book to read. It really makes you think about what life would be if all was lost. It is not fluff or an upbeat book, but a story that needs to be told and certainly needs to be read.
–Sonar4 Landing Dock

Author Tom Piccirilli paints an extremely dark picture and he does it in only a hundred and fifty pages. This book is intense and its message is exceptionally compelling . . . .Don't expect a happy ending.
–Dennis Collins, author of Turn Left at September, The Unreal McCoy, and The First Domino