THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN, Giorgio De Maria

From the introduction:

Nicknamed the “City of Black Magic” by its tolerant Italian neighbors, Turin has a long reputation for everything disquieting and spooky. By dread coincidence, Turin has also lent its Italian name to the Torino Scale, used by astronomers to grade the chances that a near-Earth object might “threaten the future of civilization as we know it.”

This is a spooky book. Uncanny.

A decade previously, Turin suffered twenty days of mass insomnia marked by nightly massacres committed by persons unseen or indescribable. The many hundreds of witnesses cannot explain what happened. Today (and “today” is very much the 1970s), an aspiring Turinese author sets out to untangle the mystery of those twenty days. What he discovers is a thoroughly inventive and chilling strain of cosmic horror. Also a metaphor for how power and ideologies use ordinary people, because horror fiction, like science fiction, is at its most affecting when it’s social fiction.

Its most compelling invention, though – and remember this book was written in 1975, only translated into English by Ramon Glasov in 2016 – is the Library. From the intro:

Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others.

The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar. Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying

“It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.”

And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life.

It very much resonates with our contemporary condition:

“Do you think human beings are really like bottomless wells? That we can drain ourselves endlessly without sooner or later finding our souls depleted? In all likelihood, that’s what people did believe, otherwise we would have stopped soon enough; but, unfortunately, we preferred to let the vampires drain everything, with the most extreme consequences.”

This is, however, only one element of a fascinatingly creepy book. It’s very good at creeping threat and incidental weirdness. And I like a good haunted radio. The protagonist is nameless, the people he encounters are broken and fearful, but there is humanity to hold on to, enough that I found myself cringing in dark expectation when the narrator commits an obvious-to-me error. That’s testament enough to the book’s atmosphere.

It’s like a young Calvino rewrote an old Lovecraft, with Eco editing.

It may well have been a response to Italian domestic politics and terror of the 1970s, but it continues to speak in valuable ways. And is, to boot, a hell of a read.

THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US+)