Publishing House: Massari Publisher
ISBN Code: 8845702243
Pages: 128
Price: 11 euros
This time John Buzi has outdone himself!
I read this shocking text during an interminable ride on the Milan subway, my cheeks red with shame, as the gazes of other passengers stared at the swollen colors of the scandalous cover. What would they have thought of me if they had only glanced at the sixty-five unclean color plates by the multifaceted "artist of the unhealthy"?
But I didn't have much time to think about it: I started reading and immediately a steel vise clawed at my stomach with Hybrid In Hunger, the first, rancid novella, starring a hellish, sumptuous tranny who reeks of death and possesses a deadly fangy sex!
Not even time to recover and the steel grip tightened on me again, stomach and intestines this time: Perfumes and Turmoil is Lovecraft's homage to a parallel universe, a vaginophobic Lovecraft from whose dark cerebral meanderings emerges, menacing and terrible, the Ancestral Woman Monster!
Why talk about lobsters? Why spoil the reader's surprise? Only one thing: unclean, unclean and more unclean!
And finally, Free Electron. A Gay Story. As bad as only John Buzi could write, with that vitriolic pen that when he wasn't writing, who knows what he turned into?
There are beautiful books, written in a perfect, flowing, artificial, glossy style, that you read with pleasure but forget as soon as you finish the last page.
Buzi's books stay with you, brand you indelibly, even make you sick, just physically. The horror described by Buzi is the fantastic reworking of inner dross, bad thoughts, aberrant sexualities, hellish desires, lust for death.
The only criticism I can make of Sex, Horror and Fantasy is that of excessive turpitude, totally out of place in a context where everything is absolutely sick and abominable. Clean and pleasant writing would have had a doubly shocking effect. Fortunately, in the English and French versions (contained in the same book) of the novellas this unpleasant effect is diluted, and it is perhaps in these two versions that the artistic range of what I consider to be one of the best contemporary "black" writers is most savored.
A book to be devoured. In fact... to be devoured by!
Reviewed by Domenico Nigro
