Sasso

Dry heat has its own exhaustion, its own madness; the visiting academics in James Sturz's Sasso were always going to be outsiders in the closed-in South Italian society of Mancanzano, but the logic of events and the climate leads them to terrible conclusions. Mancanzano is a town whose inhabitants used to live in caves in the volcanic rock that surrounds it, and still use powdered rock to cool off or stave off hunger. A series of dead teenage couples are found intertwined in caves with frescoes painted onto the crumbling rock, with paint crammed into their dead mouths; the frescoes themselves, as they are progressively revealed, become more and more sinister. The unnamed narrator and his colleagues drift into ever more dangerous emotional entanglements with each other and the townsfolk around them, and the authorities flail around looking for explanations in more and more lunatic intellectual byways, and for scapegoats... This deeply atmospheric thriller takes place in the glare of the brightest sunlight, yet its heart is as gloomy as the darkest kind of noir fiction. There is a passionate doominess to every step along the way here as well as a constant wild comedy--Sasso is an impressive and original thriller.