Tom Piccirilli on His Fascinating and Original New Novel, Shadow Season

I've raved on Omnivoracious before about mystery/noir master Tom Piccirilli--his The Cold Spot and The Coldest Mile are among my recent favorites. Now he has another first-rate novel out, Shadow Season, with an intriguing premise that severely limited or, depending on your perspective, opened up the possibilities of his prose. It's another instant classic. I got hold of Piccirilli during his busy schedule for promotion of the novel to get his thoughts on the idea behind the novel and the challenges he faced in writing it. Here's what he had to say...

  

TOM PICCIRILLI ON THE SHADOW SEASON...

My new novel is the story of a blind ex-cop, Finn, who is now a teacher at an all-girls academy in an isolated town in upstate New York. The novel is written completely from Finn's point of view, and so it's one of total darkness. Such a perspective forced me to alter my narrative style a great deal. I couldn't write with any of the usual concrete images or visual details, which are inherent in my style (and in just about every writer's style). So the other senses had to fill in a lot of the descriptions, characterization, and depictions  for me. I had to paint my secondary characters in a much different way than I had before, putting more of an emphasis on what they sounded like, smelled like, and most importantly what kind of a personality they exuded and emitted. And how close they were to Finn physically at any given time. Are these people twenty feet away or six inches away, and how does that change how he conceptualizes them?   

Since Finn can't see anyone, he's forced to base his mental images of them on other people from his past. When he talks with an older woman he imagines he's talking with his mother. And when that woman smokes a cigarette, which his mother never did, he's surprised and unsettled. When he meets with one teenage girl, he pictures his first puppy love, a southern belle, except this girl doesn't speak with a southern accent, so once again he's shocked and disturbed. So not only is his blindness a factor on the storyline, but so is the constant draw of his memories and past, and the constant agitation and bewilderment that his handicap forces upon him.

A portion of the book is written in flashback, which fills in some backstory and shows Finn as a much different person, as a young cop with a new wife, and with a best friend on the force who is quickly becoming a rogue, dirty cop. As the release date of his imprisoned former partner comes up, Finn begins to get swept up in his own need for revenge. The strain of his handicap is taking its toll on him, and he discovers that a couple of bad guys are trolling the school grounds, possibly to kill him or to cause other kinds of trouble. When some girls go missing, he's forced to act. He's also torn between the memory of his dead wife, his current girlfriend, and a seductive teenager who won't quit throwing herself at him. All of these aspects wind up telling Finn's tale in ways I normally wouldn't have if I'd been writing about a sighted protagonist.