A Different Darkness and Other Abominations
by Luigi Musolino
Translated by James D. Jenkins
with an introduction by Brian Evenson
Some years ago, I had travelled to Piedmont for the New Year. For some strange reason, we had decided not to book a hotel in Turin, as any sane tourist would but, instead, opted to stay in the smaller nearby town of Pinerolo, which had a well-connected railway station and could still serve as a practical base for our holiday.
I have fond memories of our stay, but I also recall that there was an eerie atmosphere to it. I have already written elsewhere on a “different” New Year’s Eve in the Val Pellice. But what remains even further ingrained in my mind was a walk we did from our albergo to Castello di Miradolo. Our destination was a Caravaggio exhibition which was then being held at the castle, but we thought that it would good to enjoy the local landscape on the way. The walk started sunnily enough, but as soon as we left the main road and took a country lane the atmosphere suddenly changed. A mist rising from the damp ground enveloped us, and we soon found ourselves in an alternative world of abandoned barns, half-ruined farmhouses, dark-watered brooks, and howling dogs. At one point, my better half suggested we turn back, and although I soldiered on, I must admit I felt spooked. I couldn’t believe that we could feel so far away from civilization, when we were just a walk away from a bustling town.
The stories of Luigi Musolino, born and bred in the provinces of Turin, inhabit this same world of rural shadows and eerie disorientation. Musolino is well-known as a horror author in his native Italy, and hopefully he will now be discovered and enjoyed by an international audience thanks to the ever-adventurous Valancourt Books, who featured a translation of his story Uironda in their first volume of “World Horror Stories”, and have now published a collection of his stories in an English translation by Valancourt co-founder James D. Jenkins. A Different Darkness and Other Abominations features an introduction by Brian Evenson, who succinctly describes these tales as “compelling, disturbing, and surprising.”
Most of the stories are set in Orlasco or the larger, neighbouring, Idrasca. Orlasco is “a rosary of houses and potato fields”, “a little village of one thousand souls located six kilometers from Pinerolo, twenty-eight from Turin, at the foot of the Alps”. Sometimes, the rural setting is only marginally important. The brilliant “The Last Box”, for instance, is about a grieving contortionist who comes up with a seemingly impossible way of making contact with his wife, a trapeze artist who died during a show held in Orlasco. If Orlasco, in this story, is simply a stop on the circus troupe’s route, in others it takes centre stage, its small-town feel evoking a sense of claustrophobia, hopelessness and futility. Indeed, although the rural setting might lead one to expect stories in the “folk horror” tradition, Musolino’s works lean more towards the cosmic, existential pessimism and despair of a Ligotti. The horror, very often, lies in the fact that “normality” may go askew, and the mundane may suddenly uncover unspeakable terrors.
Consider, for instance, the protagonist in “Lactic Acid”, who goes on a run, takes a short cut, and in an experience uncannily similar to mine, finds himself in suddenly hostile terrain existing, seemingly and frustratingly, on a different plane. For the hapless jogger, there was no turning back. The same happens to the truck driver in “Uironda” who ends up in “a place that doesn’t exist but is there”. In “Black Hills of Torment”, the villagers wake up to find their community haunted by the weird imaginings of a disturbed youth who had gone missing some time before. The surrounding mountains have been replaced by two-dimensional “black hills”, hemming the village in, and shutting out all routes of escape. Musolino introduces a diabolically inventive touch – all the radios, speakers and devices in the town continuously blast out the voice of Wilma Goich singing “Le colline sono in fiore.” Now, I’m not sure how familiar this will be to international readers, but no one raised on a diet of Italian tv and radio will fail to recognise this particularly cheesy, yet catchy tune, which does have all the makings of a pesky earworm (I kept finding myself humming it for around a week after reading the story...)
Some of the featured pieces can be read as allegories of grief, often linked to the loss of innocence, or to bad things happening to children. This is the case with the novella “Pupils” (originally published in Italy as a standalone book) a reworking of the Pied Piper myth set in Idrasca, and with “A Different Darkness”, the title story, taken from Musolino’s latest collection Un Buio Diverso. In the latter, a couple still reeling from the unexplained and unsolved disappearance of their little daughter discover a bottomless pit in the basement of their apartment block, whose “different darkness” promises to reunite them with their loved one, but at a terrible cost. The metaphor is clear – the black well standing in for guilt, grief, obsession and depression.
The volume also includes four stories taken from Oscure Regioni (“Dark Regions”) a two-volume publication from 2015-2016 in which Musolino, an expert in Italian folklore, reworks mythical monsters typical of different Italian regions into contemporary tales. Although they share some themes with the other featured works, these stories have a decidedly different feel to them, closer to classic folk-horror. Les Abominations des Altitudes in particular, has echoes of Algernon Blackwood, as Brian Evenson points out in his introduction and The Carnival of the Stag Man is almost Machen-like.
Horror
may still tend to be dominated by English-language authors, but this collection
(and others published by Valancourt) should serve to set the record straight.
Make no mistake, Musolino’s stories are world-class. Like the couple in the title-story, they make
you peer into a dark, yet siren-like void, before you giddily (and
cathartically?) pull back to normality.
No comments:
Post a Comment