Ivo Torello
La casa delle conchiglie

LA RECENSIONE

After the "Lovecraftian" Predatori dall'abisso by Ivo Torello—an all-round artist, not only a writer but also a musician and illustrator as you can see at the following link: https://ivotorelloart.blogspot.com/p/grafica.html—returns with a new novel with the fascinating title La casa delle conchiglie again for Edizioni Hypnos. I must immediately say that we are faced with a great book, a sort of monumental Gothic cathedral built with a refined and cultured language that reveals the depth of a true writer. Frankly, not many Italian novels of a certain level come to mind in the horror field: there are many good authors in the short story field but, over the long haul, the names that have impressed me are few: among them, I would mention Valerio Evangelisti (at least for the cycle of the Inquisitore Eymerich and the novel of Nostradamus), Gianfranco Manfredi—in particular Magia Rossa and Cromantica—and recently, Andrea Colombo with Il Diacono not to mention some works by Danilo Arona and Nicola Lombardi. La casa delle conchiglie is fundamentally an erotic novel: it is a story set in Paris in 1863 in a brothel called the "Maison des Coquillages" and is based on a solid and well-documented historical background from which a profound knowledge of the period shines through: Torello demonstrates great culture as well as possessing an aristocratic and fluent style. The story is based on the character of Madame Sabatiere, the "maitresse" of the brothel, who is narrated on how she manages, thanks to her cunning, to move from being an orphan to the owner of the Maison des Coquillages and how, through the study of magic, she comes into contact with another dimension of reality, becoming the priestess of an ancestral cult. Within the brothel, we encounter a series of ambiguous figures obsessed with their personal ghosts and their own perversions—sadism, masochism, fetishism—that are described in detail without any censorship: among them even famous characters like, among others, the painter Gustave Courbet and the astronomer Camille Flammarion. Some of these artists, like Jules de Saint-Amand—an unsuccessful painter constantly in conflict with the Academy—are in search of inspiration that they seek in a manic manner through perverse sex, frequenting the Maison from which, in the end, they will be overwhelmed, ending in a spiral of obsessive and morbid madness. La casa delle conchiglie is also a novel of magic where references to the occult, to forbidden tomes like Von Juntz's Cultes Innominables and also to the dire Necronomicon or to theatrical plays like the notorious Il Re in Giallo are not lacking. Torello, with great originality, combines the erotic novel with the occult and horror but there are also references to science and an indeterminate cosmos and in this, he takes up the lesson of Lovecraft. La casa delle conchiglie can be read in one breath but, as Paolo Di Orazio rightly wrote in the preface, a slow reading is advisable to savor its "sophisticated language." I assure you that you will be rewarded: it is a great novel and I hope it gets the success it deserves, taking into account also the uproar caused by works that sink into an ocean of mediocrity like those of Isabella Santacroce. The appendix showing the paintings of the artists mentioned in the novel is delightful.

Available on the Edizioni Hypnos website: http://www.edizionihypnos.com/home/84-la-casa-delle-conchiglie.html.

P.S. it is the most censored novel by Facebook, I myself was banned for 2 days for having posted its cover