ONCE A HIT MAN

Charlie "the Squid" Squillaci, a sixty-year old hit man in Buffalo, NY, is suffering from Lewy body dementia and its debilitating and terrifying hallucinations. The hit man faces retirement and/or senescence when he is called in for one last kick at the can. The novel follows the tragic trajectory of an increasingly confused and demented hit man facing his own inevitable extermination.

Charlie is hit by a multi-pronged assault on his existence. For one thing, he's aging poorly, his physical and mental capacities in retreat; despite this fact, he continues plying his dark trade. What with his violent past, and the shackles of his bosses, the option to simply retire from that life is a pipe dream. That's not how it works. Given Charlie's condition, errors are inevitable. And the bosses, whatever his excuses, are not exactly forgiving types.

Told in a heightened, realistic style, ONCE A HIT MAN uses the tropes of crime and mobster novels as vehicles for a more inward and existential exploration of a mind, freighted with demons, that is completely unraveling. The novel is on its surface a noirish mob or crime story, but it transcends genre while offering the readerly delights and velocities of genre.

Salvatore Difalco was born in Hamilton, Ontario and currently resides in Toronto, splitting his time between there and Sicily. He is the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil). His short stories, essays, book reviews, and poker columns have appeared in publications across Canada and the USA.

Difalco's next book, a sort of prequel to Hit Man, will take place in Utica, NY, which used to be called "Murder City." All kinds of small-time mob stuff was happening there in the 1960s and 1970s. He has a deep connection to Upstate New York and spent so much time there in his youth that he thinks he can do a series of wicked books set there (Herkimer, Utica, Rome, etc.) that are loosely connected. In other words, a sort of noir romp across the underbelly of New York State.