"She could clearly see from the back window, the one just below the Coke Light billboard, in the narrow alleyway between two casoni and the whitish cement of flour and feathers rained down from who knows where, came trilling in like a dancing drunk of impalpable white had settled on that tuft of grass sprouted between the asphalt and a puddle of oil, spiteful and insignificant intruder in the cobalt blue of the tar." Another taste: "He reached up and took her face in his hands, lifting it up... her eyes... no... it was not possible... she had a twitch... her eyes were burning like fatuous fires... incinerating the soul... flames like serpents, without consciousness, the only fuel being time... a demon awakened from the alcove..."
Neroanimale speaks for itself. It is a quite unique anthology of short stories that, at the expense of its 78 pages, does not lend itself to being read all in one go. The risk would be to miss what makes it really interesting.
The plots are mostly captivating and extremely heterogeneous, suffering the influence of the great authors of the past, from Poe to Lovecraft, but retaining their own distinct originality. They range from everyday horror to supernatural horror, which is nevertheless punctually placed in a concrete and realistic social context. Dreams, reminiscences and ancestral visions play a leading role, although there is no lack of a dash of healthy truculence with a Barkerian flavor.
But this is not the salient feature of Neroanimale. What makes it a book in itself is the style of Marangoni, a poet even before he is a storyteller. Prague, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas: it is from their writings that the author draws the frequent quotations that open his tales, tales characterized by a highly personal style that is not always easy to read, somewhere between prose and poetry, between classicism and scapigliatura. At times Marangoni seems to get lost in the broad swirls of his thoughts: carried away by an instinctive taste for words, he seems to forget syntax, giving rise to interminable and very elaborate periods. At other times he chooses to be quick and searing, consciously leaving aside all formalism. Still others he leans on a more traditional style, yet never renounces a touch of genuine creativity.
An "almost" debut this (the short story The Ashes, also present in this volume, has already appeared in the anthology Infernal Visions, Edizioni G.Ho.S.T., Turin) certainly noteworthy, but above all full of promise that it is now up to the young author, born in 1979, to fulfill.
Edizioni Il Foglio - Coll. Contemporary Authors Fiction - pages 78 Price € 7.00
Reviewed by Marco Zolin
