The blasphemy of horror

By Alda Teodorani

Giovanni Buzi is one of those rare examples in Italy of writers who are able to mix sex and horror in an impeccable manner. I don't know - and I don’t want to know – where his creative vein comes from, how he has grown as a writer, what his literary diet has been. What is important is the result.

His language is razor-sharp, enriched - in my opinion - by the musicality of the French language which Giovanni loves and frequents, being resident in Belgium despite his very Italian origins.

The mystery and danger of the female sex find in Giovanni Buzi a poet both impassioned and at the same time detached, almost in a kind of narration outside and beyond time and space. Limpid sentences separate themselves from the literary material, from the plot, making for an even more palpable, more “fluorescent” style, if you will permit me the use of the term borrowed from the title of a recent work by this author.

I am always a little apprehensive when a writer asks me to write a preface for their book. I am not a reader of prefaces; if I find one at the beginning of a volume I happily skip it, not caring what its writer thinks, even if he is very illustrious (in that case I am even more inclined to press on with the book itself!). I'm not interested; I want to make up my own mind. Perhaps I will miss some linguistic subtleties, analyses of double or triple meanings, perhaps the preface writer has even picked up on metaphors which will pass me by. But I am not interested - I want to be the one guiding my reading. And for this reason when someone asks me to write a preface, normally I refuse without a moment’s hesitation.

But if the writer in question is a fine writer, and if my preface can help me publish his book, then I am very happy to write one, and if you, reading these words, decide to buy this book, I will be very happy. Because in Italy we need fine writers good at managing literature. Not only in the mainstream, where literature is corrupted by overuse, volumes turned into bourgeois objects by the drawing rooms where they rest in heavy wooden bookcases. We need fine writers in the different specialist genres above all, including horror, a horror which Giovanni Buzi puts on to the page with great lightness and irony, no less disturbing for this. But all of us need to be a little more disturbed by narrative (our blasphemous interior mirror) and less by television and television news (horrible and squalid exterior mirrors).

If you buy this book, or other horror books and specialist genres in general, you will do a great deal of good to your soul, albeit with a little blasphemy. Because horror, if done well, is something veritably profane.

Alda Teodorani

translation: Fiona Peterson

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