Ivo Torello
Predatori dall'abisso

Predators from the Abyss, published by Hypnos Editions in the series “Mirabilia”, is the first novel by Ivo Torello, who, besides being a writer, is also the author, along with the dark project Kozai Resonance, of gloomy and spectral dark-ambient and symphonic music compositions with Kozai Resonance (http://www.last.fm/it/music/Kozai+Resonance). On his blog (http://lovecraftiancreatures.blogspot.it/) you can view his sculptures and illustrations. In the past, he has written many horror stories that have received positive reviews and he has won the prestigious Lovecraft Award. With Predators from the Abyss, Torello, as he extensively explains in the lengthy afterword, begins a new phase of his literary career in the name of “sense of wonder”. Highly critical of trendy literary genres like noir, the Genoese writer has decided to write a novel that revives the “sense of wonder”, a concept that indeed seems foreign to most of today’s literary production.

Torello has thus revived, with Predators from the Abyss, the “cosmic terror” of writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson by writing a dark science fiction novel. This is undoubtedly a commendable endeavor, which brings back to light a genuine attitude towards old “weird” literature, a genre that seemed buried and forgotten by the publishing industry. The volume is presented with a beautiful cover featuring an illustration taken from a plate by the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. The story is set in London and Scotland in 1890 but, despite the chosen period, it has no connection with the “steampunk” literary genre. The story begins in a dark and rainy London where Julius Milton, a penniless artist who depicts strange creatures in his sketches viewed at the British Museum, is obsessed with hallucinatory dreams showing him a mad reality. In these nightmares, he sees a phantasmic castle with asymmetric towers, inconceivable monsters, and senses a icy presence coming from the abyss of the cosmos. It’s impossible not to think of the legendary Wilcox, the young artist of The Call of Cthulhu. In his “visions” Wilcox saw the mad “Lovecraftian” deities which he then reproduced in his sculptures. Milton manages to solve the enigma of the castle with the help of a bookseller: the building does indeed exist and is located in Scotland in the village of Kirsdale, in the Highlands. He then learns, through a newspaper article, about the death in Kirsdale of Professor Renwick, a respected paleontologist whose research in the local Scottish peat bog had unearthed very ancient fossils.

At this point, Milton, driven by curiosity, leaves London and decides to go to Kirsdale. There he meets Thaddeus Walkley, a zoology lecturer and “monster collector”, who is also there to try to solve the case. The two start investigating the inexplicable mysteries that are occurring: the local cows and sheep are horribly killed and torn apart by unknown creatures. Their incursion into Renwick’s villa leads them to the discovery, among many other books of magic and esotericism, of volumes like The Book of Eibon and Von Juntz’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, texts well known to any “Lovecraftian” enthusiast. What makes the case more unsettling is the existence of a painting in Kirsdale Abbey depicting an apocalyptic battle with dragons that seem to come from other worlds. The painting will be the key to solving the enigma.