http://www.gothicrevue.com/choirillchildren.html

Title: Choir of Ill Children
Author: Tom Piccirilli
ISBN: O-553-56719-6
Price: $5.99 US; $8.99 Canada





Three-time Bram Stoker Award winner Tom Piccirilli weaves a spellbound tale with his latest release from Bantam Books, A Choir of Ill Children.
Set in the South, in the small town of Kingdom Come, this appalling but captivating tale centers around one man who has been bestowed guardianship of his conjoined triplet brothers and their father's business following their father's death and their mother's mysterious disappearance.
If it wasn't strange enough that Thomas, the main character, has guardianship of his brothers, circumstances surrounding them and the town they reside in soon begin to emerge when , the triplets' talk about a murdered six-year-old.
"They're vague about it," Piccirilli writes early on in the book, in the voice of the main character, Thomas. "On occasion, they make it sound like they killed him, and at other times it seems like they only discovered him. I can find no evidence, no reports of a missing child while I listen to their murmured descriptions every night..."
"It's happened before," he adds. "I once found a boy in the swamp..."
The statement leads Piccirilli an avenue to weave the first of many subplots of the book that eventually tie up nicely by the book's conclusion, even though there were some strands left undone that could easily make room for a sequel to this compelling book.
It should be noted that the book is not for the fair-hearted and/or the very young. With the sexual content within sections of the book and some crude and foul language, the targeted audience is more geared toward adults and mature young adults.
An example of this, early on in the book, is the way Piccirilli describes the way Dodi Coots is sleeping. "She sighs and purrs, stretching so that her thigh drips moonlight across the floor. Dead leaves brush against the window, taping softly. She creeps upon my brothers and tastes each of them in turn, stiffly swabbing the bulging curves of their forebrain..."
The way Piccirilli writes, however, is poetic at times while, at other points within the book leaves the reader appalled, such as the paragraph noted above. Even though some may become appalled by some of the scenes Piccirilli includes in the book, there are others where he beckons readers to read on, especially in regards to the murdered boy Thomas found in the bayou. When he finds the body within a storage container in the attack of his home, he begins to wonder who really done it. Had he?
Sometimes, things aren't as they seem.