The Isle of the Dead
1885. An island off the Ligurian coast, where the architecture built for the dead is finer than anything built for the living.
Andrea Nascimbeni, an anthropologist from Verona, has seen the place before - in the paintings of his friend Arnold B cklin. He goes there alone, for his own reasons, to record a burial custom found nowhere else in Europe. He expects superstition and folklore. He expects to explain them.
The townspeople are courteous. They answer his questions. What they will not explain is why the tombs outnumber the houses, why some of them are hidden from casual visitors, or what happens on the night the innkeeper calls, with a small smile, the thirty-second of October.
Fever comes. So does a woman. Neither is what it appears to be.
By the time Nascimbeni understands what he has been permitted to observe, he has already taken part in it - and he will never practise his profession again.
Written as if penned by Nascimbeni himself, The Isle of the Dead recreates the voice and sensibility of the late nineteenth century: a slow, atmospheric novel in which faith in science meets something older, and loses. Inspired by B cklin's paintings and by Rachmaninov's symphonic poem of the same name.
Book One of the Italian Gothic series. Each novel stands alone.
The Italian edition was selected by a panel of experts for the Turin International Book Fair, Italy's most important literary event.
Fabrizio Valenza was born in Verona in 1972. A writer and philosopher, and a member of the Horror Writers Association, he writes gothic fiction set in the Italy that tourists never see.
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