When a mystery novel with overtones of a thriller is presented to us from an everyday aspect, we immerse ourselves even more in the specific plot that is presented to us. That is what happens in the book In the devil's house. Giulio Terenzi is a routine guy with an ordinary life, only one day he put the…. where he had the pot (as they say in a more than colloquial way). Giulio is removed from the bank office where he works and assigned to Castromagno, a remote town where the least required is a bank branch. If not for the elderly Baroness Eleonora de Santis, whose patrimony, in principle, could justify the existence of a few more branches.
Giulio feels devastated to have been assigned to that town dominated by a sense of nineteenth-century decadence. The guy to whom he takes over, whose physiognomy seems to have been impregnated with the reigning antiquity, informs him of the task that has been entrusted to him. But beyond the administrative or commercial chores, it provides a background on the particular idiosyncrasy of some very special locals, and lurid cases of disappearances of people who had been assuming as irrelevant to any of the other neighbors.
The feeling of estrangement that invades Giulio gradually becomes a complete and alienating notion about a reality that suffocates in its pause, in its unreal cadence, where time seems to pass like a wait towards the sinister.
Especially since certain characters like Corrado, the baroness's grandson, haunt that dark feeling of some kind of evil. What's a young guy like him doing in that town? What happens to those locals indulged in miserable routines turned into a countdown to their disappearances?
The renowned Italian author Marco Romano he presents himself to us as a brand new voice in Italian literature.
You can buy the book In the devil's house, the new novel by Romano de Marco, here: