Luigi Musolino
Eredità di carne

I knew Luigi Musolino for his extraordinary stories. I was particularly impressed by Nere colline del supplizio, not coincidentally a winner of the Hypnos Prize and later included in the splendid anthology Uironda. Now Musolino is trying his hand at a novel, and it is certainly an ambitious choice. Not all Italian horror writers succeed in being convincing over the long haul. Personally, I particularly appreciated Il diacono by Andrea G. Colombo and L’estate di Montebuio by Danilo Arona, as well as the always excellent Nicola Lombardi, but there aren't as many examples. However, I was very curious to read a novel by Musolino, and I can say right away that this Eredità di carne did not disappoint me. It is a return to the folk-horror atmospheres that characterized books like Bialere. Storie da Idrasca and Oscure regioni, and which are somewhat the trademark of Piedmontese writers like the aforementioned Danilo Arona but also of Maurizio Cometto and Christian Sartirana. On the other hand, sleepy Italian provinces generate monsters: how can we forget that Tiziano Sclavi comes from Broni in Pavese while Sergio Bissoli is from Cerea in the deep Veneto.

The story is set in Val Chisone in the small village of Roure. Here, Michele Ciot leads a desperate existence: he has been in crisis for a long time, lost his job, and his fiancée suffers from chronic bronchitis and alcohol problems. Indeed, from the very beginning of the novel, the horror of loneliness in a miserable existence is evident, akin to that experienced by many people abandoned to themselves in small towns. A message from an old friend, Oliviero Cardon, suggests the possibility of a rebirth. Cardon proposes visiting the old Pracatinat sanatorium, isolated in the mountains, to steal a collection of antique furniture. The endeavor initially leaves him perplexed, but he eventually accepts. In the background, the ancient legend of the Cannibal Witch looms—a poor woman martyred by the Nazis, with the complicity of the common folk, during the Resistance and raised to the status of a monster over time—while childhood ghosts bring to light an old story that happened right within the sanatorium, where, in the company of a friend who later died of a heroin overdose, he suffered trauma. The Pracatinat sanatorium is at the center of this book and undeniably represents the classic "topos" of the "bad place" so beloved in horror literature from Shirley Jackson to Richard Matheson to Stephen King. As the story unfolds, the tension also increases; Musolino is a master at creating the right "climax" and the book can be read in one go. The epilogue that unfolds inside the sanatorium, where Michele Ciot and Oliviero Cardone find themselves trapped, is something distressing and terrifying and hard to forget. In the end, the phantomatic witch makes her appearance, but she, like other phenomena described that seem to haunt Val Chisone, perhaps belong to the horrors of the mind and traumas buried in the unconscious that resurface in the light. Distinguishing between reality and hallucination is not easy, and therein lies the great charm of this book in which the author unleashed his obsessions. There are also SS zombies. In short, Musolino spared nothing! In this sense, Eredità di carne brings to mind, more than Lovecraft, Stephen King and also Clive Barker for certain splatter situations. If you love horror, don't miss Eredità di carne: I assure you that thrills are guaranteed.