![]() 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. By Giorgio De Maria, Ramon Glazov, ISBN: 9781631492297, Hardcover. Along the way he was a concert piano player, theatre critic, journalist and well known leftish culture vulture. A few years later he became a committed Catholic and never wrote again, dying in 2009 aged 85. ![]() ![]() The violence began when someone, or something, killed Giovanni Bergesio, a bank employee, by slamming his body into a tree. De Maria only wrote four novels between 19, of which Twenty Days was his last. ![]() 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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