The Walls of the Castle

From four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, two-time winner of the International Thriller Writers Award and finalist for the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award Tom Piccirilli comes an intense and visceral psychological thriller novella, the first title in the Black Labyrinth imprint illustrated by Gothic artist Santiago Caruso. In the labyrinthian maze of endless corridors, annexes, and wings of the enormous medical complex known as the Castle prowls a grief-stricken man determined to redeem himself and bring justice for those victims incapable of doing it for themselves. During the four months that his son lay dying, ex-con Kasteel lost his job, his wife, and nearly his mind. He became a fixture at the Castle, a phantom prowling the halls in the deep night, a shadow of his former self until he faded from sight and was forgotten altogether. Now, without any life to return to, he takes it upon himself to become the Castle's guardian. He lives off the grid hiding among the hundreds of miles of twisting passages, rooms, offices, and underground parking structures. Despair, confusion, and terror are the natural state and trade of any hospital: Not only must the patients endure disease and infirmity, but others are victims of physical and sexual abuse from the outside world or from cruel security guards. The Castle was originally a colonial Dutch settlement: a village that grew into a town which grew into a city and at last became a hospital. Kasteel has lost his very identity to this place, taking for himself the original Dutch name for "Castle." Kasteel sleeps in empty operating theaters, sneaks food from the cafeteria, hacks into computers, and is privy to both staff and patient files. Using his skills as a burglar he tracks down the attackers, the deceivers, and the killers. In the psychiatric wing's day rooms and gardens long-suffering patient Hedgewick is Kasteel's only friend. Hedgewick sees his father's ghost and claims to fight in a gladiatorial arena while the hospital guards bet on the winners. Kasteel and Hedge often meet in the Fool's Tower, a ten-story high steeple once used to quarantine yellow fever victims a century ago, overlooking acres of gardens. A place where family members go to pray for their loved ones, and the distraught often commit suicide. But a new name is now whispered in the Castle: Abaddon, the ancient name for the angel of death. A brain-damaged woman has visions and speaks only to Kasteel. Abaddon is a killer, a man lost to the Castle like Kasteel himself, wandering the corridors searching out victims. Even as Abaddon hunts the innocent, Kasteel hunts Abaddon, eager for a final showdown that may at last set him free. An atmospheric yet action-packed, mature psychological thriller that is part examination into the bonds of family and part treatise on the nature of identity, THE WALLS OF THE CASTLE explores the deepest areas of what makes us who we are. With a noir sensibility and complexity of character, the novella is a hybrid psychological thriller that's part suspense tale, part family saga, and part literate mystery. "I've reviewed many of Tom Piccirilli's books, and I feel like I'm running out of ways to praise him. Each new book is as heartfelt and thought-provoking as the last, and every time you think that he can't possibly come back with something as affecting and personal and ambitious as what you just read, he proves you wrong. The Walls of the Castle is no exception. I have no idea how he's going to top it..." - FEAR NET "(A Choir of Ill Children is) A wonderfully wacked, disorienting, fully creepy book...The poetic nature of the prose and seriousness of intent carried the day in every scene." -Dean Koontz