Inevitably drawn into the city’s occult netherworld, he unearths the stuff of modern nightmares: what’s shared can never be unshared.Īn allegory inspired by the grisly neo-fascist campaigns of its day, The Twenty Days of Turin has enjoyed a fervent cult following in Italy for forty years. That is, until a lonely salaryman decides to investigate these mysterious events, which the citizenry of Turin fear to mention. As the city of Turin suffers a twenty-day "phenomenon of collective psychosis" culminating in nightly massacres that hundreds of witnesses cannot explain, the Library is shut down and erased from history. In the spare wing of a church-run sanatorium, some zealous youths create "the Library," a space where lonely citizens can read one another’s personal diaries and connect with like-minded souls in "dialogues across the ether." But when their scribblings devolve into the ugliest confessions of the macabre, the Library’s users learn too late that a malicious force has consumed their privacy and their sanity. (Feb.Written during the height of the 1970s Italian domestic terror, a cult novel, with distinct echoes of Lovecraft and Borges, makes its English-language debut. De Maria (1924–2009) excels at creating a growing sense of cosmic menace in this mesmerizing work of literate horror.
The oddities multiply after an interview with an attorney, who reports hearing some terrifying screams at the time of Bergesio’s murder that had something “gray and metallic” behind them.
The narrator interviews the dead man’s sister, who relates that her brother was certain that two of the city’s statues had switched places shortly before his death. The violence began when someone, or something, killed Giovanni Bergesio, a bank employee, by slamming his body into a tree. What was behind the series of bizarre deaths labeled the 20 Days of Turin? Though some believed the unsettling period was a “dire warning signal from on high addressed to humanity,” others dismissed it as just a “phenomenon of collective psychosis.” Ten years after the event, De Maria’s unnamed narrator pursues the truth in this subtle, enigmatic novel, which contains some eerily prescient predictions about the ways people would communicate in the Internet era.
First published in Italy in 1977, De Maria’s cult classic makes its English-language debut.
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