Pazuzu: Effetto Nocebo (Italian Edition) – Paperback Edition
Demons, as you may know, have a thing for trying to materialize into concrete reality…
Pazuzu: Effetto Nocebo, my latest novel, is now available in paperback edition as well. You can (unless you want to offend Pazuzu, but that’s your decision and who am I to deter you) get the book on Amazon, IBS, Libreria Universitaria, Feltrinelli, Mondadori Store — or basically any store selling Italian-language books. The book consists of 248 pages, none of which, I promise, is superfluous. I still have to touch it because living on a small Atlantic island doesn’t make it easy to get things shipped to — but Valentina and I are travelling to Italy tomorrow and we’re looking forward to it because, well, ebooks are cool and all that but we’re oldschool paper-fetishists. People who touched it say it feels pretty good. They say it is smooth. They are probably possessed. It does not contain any “actual” curse that we know of. Saw the quotes? Yeah. Apart from that, it is published by Delos Digital, which already did the ebook edition, in their Greyhound line.
So, considering it’s one o’clock, my eyes are fluttering, the book is the same I’ve already written an article about when the ebook came out, well I’ll go ahead and just shamelessly copy-paste the rest of the post — ha!
Pazuzu: Effetto Nocebo is co-authored by me and my wife (and, after Urlan and Poiesis, regular second writing head) Valentina Kay in unholy alliance with Italian horror legend Danilo Arona. This should be cool for you but it’s extra cool for me because I’ve always considered Danilo my master and his writings were a major inspiration for my work. He penned (many many years ago) the postface to my debut novel Melodia and a preface to Quintessenza; I’ve worked for years as his editor and he is, generally, an old-school gentleman and a wonderful person.
Pazuzu: Effetto Nocebo was sparked fifteen years ago, at a dinner when Danilo made a bone-chilling speech about the Nocebo Effect and the Hmong/Terranova incident, challenging the audience to write something about it.
Well, it took a while.
But it began even before that, actually, when Valentina gifted me a copy of a book with a chimerical demon on the cover which had caught her beautiful eye in a supermarket. The book was L’ombra del dio alato, it was about Pazuzu, and it made us discover Arona. And, well, put a lot of things in motion. We were barely more than kids back then and it’s strange to realize a book is coming out written by the three of us — puzzling together many years of shared memories and experiences.
That’s not all: an excellent author (and Sumerian demon authority) such as Edoardo Rosati has penned a beautiful preface which says stuff like There are stories which aren’t just read. They burrow under your skin like scabies. And devour your guts. And they keep living even after the last page has been turned. Nocebo is one of those.
Got it?
And of course — last but not least — many thanks to Franco Forte at Delos, who accompanied the book to publication.
And yeah, should you be wondering why it’s taking so long for Episode Two: Icebreaking, that’s part of why… but it is coming pretty soon, I swear. (And “pretty soon” is pretty subjective, don’t you ever forget.)
