Flame Tree Press / March 2022
Review by: Vince A. Liaguno

The literary world has enjoyed a spate of well-received meta-slashers in recent years—from Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group and Brian McAuley’s Curse of the Reaper to the undisputed champ of the sub-genre, Stephen Graham Jones, with his The Last Final Girl, Night of the Mannequins, The Babysitter Murders, and his award-winning Indian Lake Trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and the upcoming The Angel of Indian Lake).

Now horror author John Everson takes on the much-revered precursor to the slasher era—the giallo. With his thirteenth novel, Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds, Everson crafts a straightforward homage to the highly-stylized, lurid Italian murder mysteries of the 60s and 70s. In keeping with the archetypal giallo plot, a mysterious, black-gloved psychopathic killer stalks and butchers a series of beautiful women—in this case, student members of a jazz ensemble called The Songbirds. Incoming American transfer student Eve Springer arrives at a renowned Belgium musical conservatory called The Eyrie to study under the esteemed musical virtuoso Professor Ernest Von Klein. After auditioning for the titular group at the urging of Von Klein, Eve finds herself the campus jazz collective’s newest pianist, replacing the star of the school’s piano program who she learns was strangled with a piano wire just days before.

Everson knows his way around the structure of the giallo, layering in all the requisite ingredients—the plodding police detective, an unreliable protagonist, ample red herrings, and a bloody body count. The mystery itself is fleshed out in a suitably flamboyant manner consistent with any Mario Bava, Dario Argento, or Lucio Fulci film entry. Everson’s kills are, again, consistent with the giallo subgenre—outlandishly violent, sexually provocative, and themed (in this case, all the kills revolve around music in some way). One murder involving a silver saxophone is so gag-inducingly gruesome that even seasoned gorehounds will wince. Even the book’s cover—a black-gloved hand reaching for a frightened young woman against a garish yellow backdrop with red title letters—reflects the classic garish aesthetic of the giallo.

What sets Everson’s tackling of the giallo-in-print apart from his literary slasher brethren is that he’s playing it straight—this isn’t some kind of deconstruction of the genre. No clever inside jokes or meta references to the film subgenre it lovingly imitates. No, Everson sticks to the giallo’s cat-and-mouse conventions and gives readers a full-on technicolor nightmare that’s as moody as any cinematic giallo’s prog rock score. It’s a frightfully fun melodramatic murder mystery with the pacing of a sexy thriller.

Purchase Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds by John Everson.