Eve Springer has left New York and come to Ghent, Belgium for a chance to learn at the prestigious Royal Conservatory (aka the Eyrie), and her head is stuffed up with dreams and opportunity. However, she arrives to tragic news. A promising piano student has been murdered on school grounds, the killer and the motive for the crime are both as yet unknown. Silver lining: the local student jazz band now needs a new piano player, and the school’s star professor/composer is impressed enough with Eve to suggest she try out for the position. She does and succeeds in becoming a part of the group. However, joining a band called the Songbirds in a novel titled Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds does not bode well for one’s longevity and/or sanity. Eve will find herself tested, tormented by, falsely accused of, and ultimately performing her own investigation into several brutal crimes over the course of this work. Some of her new friends will die, many will fall under suspicion. But who is the killer?
Could the killer be Professor Von Klein himself, a man who might have had more than a simple professor/student relationship with one of the victims? What about Elena or Erika, the spooky soprano saxophone playing twins, one of whom really likes the color black? Could it be Eve’s new boyo Richard, who almost has as much of a love for the kinds of torture chamber accoutrements that were used over the ages as he does for his sax? Maybe it’s Gianna, the Songbirds’ aggressive and competitive sax player? Perhaps the local coffeehouse owner Claude possesses the necessary clue to shed light on the guilty party and their motivation … John Everson keeps the mystery up until a final climactic revelation and confrontation.
Last year, I saw some giallo film touches in Sarah Pearse’s The Sanitorium. They were subtle, possibly unconscious additions to a serial killer storyline. There’s nothing subtle nor unconscious about the giallo touches found in John Everson’s novel, Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds. This is a novel steeped in the glorious genre of the 1960s and 1970s, which kicked off with Mario Bava’s Evil Eye (1963) and only got weirder, wilder, bloodier, and more disquieting as time went by. Sure, there were a series of novels with an indicative yellow cover that first got the name giallo (some of which inspired film adaptations), but it’s the films that seem to be fueling Everson’s novel. It is both referential and affectionate, a love letter to the works of Bava, Argento, Fulci, Miraglia, and others.
It is peculiar to me to compose a fiction review that is chock full of film references, but that’s the kind of book this is. This is not suggesting the book stands completely removed from the horror fiction field, but the clearest connections are to the film. Readers interested only in losing themselves in something that is both versed in genre fiction’s history and offering up endless nods to current and classic practitioners will probably be left wanting here. The story is a solid one, a gruesome mystery that appeals on its own. However, it is enriched not by a love of horror fiction’s history but of film. Italian film. Italian suspense/thriller films.
Everson is obviously a fan of giallo films, and stocks his novel with some sly references to various elements and creators involved in those pieces. For example, there are some plays on the colors found in Bava-inspired films:
The room was a revolving wash of primary colors. In one corner, a lava lamp beamed the walls with an electric shade of blue, as blobs of color hovered and shifted in the clear center. On the desk, a lampshade was draped in a red silk blouse, dimming the light and warming the room with a rich subdued ambiance. In another corner, Gianna had a tall LED lamp which oscillated slowly across the spectrum, throwing a kaleidoscope of primary colors across the white ceiling.
Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds, Location 1144
Everson even manages suggestions of the occasional intercut closeups that appear in giallo films, bringing our attention to the blobs in the lamp, say.
As well, we are not surprised to see the look of the killer, dressed to kill.
She couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman. The figure blended into the shadows thanks to a black long-sleeved shirt and dark jeans, along with black leather gloves and something equally dark pulled down to cover his or her face. It might have been nylon, because while she couldn’t see features clearly, she could see the glint of eyes through the upper half above the jut of the nose.
The long sleeves and gloves were enough of a tip-off that something here was very wrong, btu the face mask or hood sent Anita’s stomach to her feet. Whoever was back there did not mean her any good.
Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds, Location 795
In all the closeups, I’m sure it’s Everson’s hands in those gloves (as all the gloved hands in Dario Argento’s giallo films are performed by the director himself).
However, the homages are not restricted to visuals. There are little teasers all throughout.
A musical piece called “Piano Concerto in Profundo Rosso” offers a wink toward the Italian title of Argento’s Deep Red (1975).
In these pages, we also find Simonetti Scholars, a prize that invokes the name of Claudio Simonetti, one of the founding members of the group Goblin, and responsible both for giallo/horror film scores with that band as well as on his own.
There’s a prestigious scholarship several students are vying for, named for the famed composer Ennio Morricone, who is responsible for the music for several Dario Argento films (e.g., 1970’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) as well as various giallo films such as 1975’s Autopsy, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971).
Even the title is one of those lengthy things that perfectly encapsulates the story it’s trying to tell. It fits right alongside a variety of giallo titles, including the body count promises of Five Dolls For An August Moon (1970) or The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) as well as the more evocative ones like Your Vice Is A Locked Room, and Only I Have The Key (1972) or The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2014). Of course, there is an animal there that might sit easily on the same shelf as Argento’s animal trilogy, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971), or Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971).
If a reader can get into the film inspiration side of the book, then they may well find part of the fun of the book is dream casting the various characters. Eve herself could be Jessica Harper from 1977’s Suspiria (which is not actually a giallo but certainly informed by Argento’s giallo work). Gianna is, in my mind’s eye, Asia Argento circa that actress’ appearance in Trauma (1993) or The Stendhal Syndrome (1996). Inspector Martino is played by a somewhat slimmer (but no less snarky) Corrado Gaipa from Crazy Desires of a Murderer (1977). Professor von might be John Saxon with an outrageous accent.
Everson’s writing is clean and clear. He excels at setting mood and executing those kill set pieces. He infuses the book with some blackly comic touches as well, which are nicely done. He also shows his love of Belgian beers throughout the book—one of which, Delirium Tremens, I wholeheartedly agree is a tasty brew indeed.
The book is composed of fifty different sections: forty eight chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue. None of them is terribly long. The writing is brisk, but it never gets terse the way James Patterson’s writing can be in his thrillers. Everson establishes his scenes and runs through them well, then breaks and moves on to the next. In that way, the chapters are often like single scenes or sequences found in films, playing out before we cut to something/somewhere else.
Everson’s writing uses the music theme running throughout to good effect. We get a sense of these students’ passion for the music, the nuts and bolts approach to both music and the conversations that come about around it, as well as the macabre ways musical instruments can be employed for murderous purposes. For example, the novel’s prologue concludes with the killer saying, “‘Live by the piano, die by the piano'” to the dying girl. (Location 73) This sentiment will be echoed later, when various victims are dispatched by the instruments they were mastering in increasingly gruesome fashion. Who among the jazz ensemble will be next to fall? Everson does a fine job of keeping the plot and subplots rolling along, punctuating the investigation and budding/building relationships with occasional forays into murder. He also keeps the suspects shrouded in mystery until the end, peeling away layers on some but not all of them before the final reveal. We seldom go too deep into the subject of music, it’s composition, or its performance, but these topics nevertheless inform the text. Everson did some homework, and it shows.
As well, the Belgian setting is explored in a couple of sections to good effect. Most often, the characters venture out of the school for gigs at a local coffeehouse (cheekily named Heavy Beans). Still, there are some trips into the city proper, and Ghent has enough of a presence to color the whole narrative in fun ways. It’s there in our introduction to Eve, who appears in an opening trip through town that echoes a similar journey in Suspiria: a student who is stuck with a cab driver who refuses to admit he understands her speech (in the film, it’s German; here, we are told most Belgians speaking Flemish, French, and English). Later on, we get some walking tour of a local castle and other locations to round out the setting. Again, we seldom go deep into the Belgian location as a character, but the author sprinkles enough little reminders throughout to keep us aware that we aren’t in New York anymore. Is it authentic? I cannot say. For all I know, it is the equivalent of those Italian productions that are set in some remote city (Freiburg, Germany say) which visits the location to capture a few exterior shots and then interposes them into other footage taken on good Italian sets/locales. We might have a weird blend of settings (some moments seemed a tad more American than European), but I honestly cannot say how authentic any of it is. Not that authenticity necessarily matters in a story like this.
If the book has a stumble, it’s in the character of Eve Springer herself. She’s kind of bland and only holds the interest when pulled into events outside of her control. This too is remaining in spirit to a lot of giallo flicks, where the protagonist is nowhere near as interesting as the quirky suspects and characters he/she interacts with. David Hemmings’ role as the beleaguered protagonist Marcus Daly in Deep Red is never as fun or enchanting as Daria Niccolodi’s performance as his girl Friday, Gianna Brezzi. However, here we get some will she/won’t she sexual tension stuff that could be made more interesting if Eve weren’t so … prosaic.
Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds is a wonderfully perverse and gloriously gruesome mystery/thriller. In other words, it’s a solid entry in the giallo genre to which it is also a love letter. Aside from all those movie references and homages, John Everson has crafted an entertaining read with plenty of mystery and mood to spare.
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Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds will be available from Flame Tree Press on February 22. It is available for pre-order in eBook, hardcover, and paperback editions. An audiobook edition will likely appear, as well.
Next week, we return to the works of an author we’ve been steadily revisiting/visiting since the appearance of The Only Good Indians a couple of years ago. Growing Up Dead In Texas is one part memoir, one part novel, and all Stephen Graham Jones. It is available ineBook, paperback, and audiobook editions.
WORKS CITED
Everson, John. Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds. Flame Tree Press: 2022.
“Live By the Piano, Die By The Piano: John Everson’s Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds” is copyright © 2022 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Flame Tree Press eBook edition, released 2022.
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Second Disclosure: I received a free eARC through NetGalley in exchange for a review.
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