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A Different Darkness and Other Abominations

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The highly original and truly terrifying folk horror of Italy's Luigi Musolino was introduced to an international audience in the acclaimed The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and now at last an entire volume of the author's best work - eight stories and three novellas - is available in English for the first time.

In 'Lactic Acid', a jogger takes an unfamiliar shortcut and quickly finds himself trapped in a nightmare from which there may be no escape. In 'Uironda', a strange urban legend overheard at a rest stop becomes a horrifying reality for one truck driver. 'The Last Box' tells of a grieving contortionist's plan to make contact with his dead trapeze artist wife by twisting his body into the abstruse angles of her mangled corpse. And in the title novella, after a little girl vanishes in a supermarket, her parents find a strange solace when they find a bottomless pit in their basement from which her laughter seems to echo - but the abyss's shimmering darkness is not what it seems ...

Musolino's tales, set among the plains and mountains of his native Piedmont, are uniquely Italian, but the darkness he probes is universal. As Brian Evenson writes in the introduction, 'Musolino has a strong and original voice and uses it to get to some uniquely dark places. Rather than blood or gore, he's ultimately interested in what's truly terrifying: the vertiginous darkness that threatens to open up and swallow us. A darkness that calls to us, calls to us, until we can't help but answer and stumble toward it.'

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 12, 2022
      Though all set in Musolino’s native Italy, the 11 stories in this outstanding collection, most translated into English for the first time, feature horrors that resonate far beyond national borders. Several are worked up from folk themes, among them “Les Abominations des Altitudes,” about mythical Alpine creatures that lure mountaineers to a terrifying fate, and “The Carnival of the Stag Man,” in which two men hunt a godlike creature from the prehistoric past. “Pupils,” a variation on the story of the Pied Piper, tells of an ancient “lord of dust” who poisons children with awareness of the hopelessness of their futures. Common to all are profound moments of existential dread when characters are plunged from their ordinary world into one of disorienting uncertainty and despair. The masterful “Lactic Acid” does this best: a jogger takes an unfamiliar shortcut and ends up trapped outside his former reality. American horror readers are sure to welcome this powerful voice.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from August 12, 2022

      Italian author Musolino is one of Italy's most well-known horror writers, and this collection, translated into English for the first time, is a great introduction to his particular brand of dark fiction. Whether it's a trucker stumbling onto a highway exit full of horrors, a mountain climber's discovery of monsters at the literal top of the world, or a family who lost a child, but they found her voice calling to them from a hole in their basement, the characters in his stories are built into living people with lives and motivations only to be torn down by traumatic circumstances and existential dread. The themes of cosmic horror and folk horror that permeate these stories also add to their oppressive and unsettling atmosphere. There may be fans of gothic and folk horror who have yet to hear of this author, and this collection is a great way to remedy that canonical oversight. VERDICT Worthy of being mentioned alongside his horror contemporaries like Joe Hill, Stephen Graham Jones, and Paul Tremblay, Musolino is a writer whose stories are a dark journey through the shadowy Italian countryside, the depths of human despair, and the heights of imagination.

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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