20 best genre fiction writers from other countries to expand your horizons

The Twenty Days of Turin (Cover image via Liveright)

5. Giorgio De Maria

Like so many foreign language books, it took seemingly forever for The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio De Maria’s unsettling horror novel, to get an English translation. Now that it’s here, though, we can take part in the utter strangeness, too.

The Twenty Days of Turin was actually published in 1977 in Italy, where it eventually became an underground cult favorite. It is tied up with the titular days where residents of Turin, Italy are plagued by a wave of strangeness. Insomniacs shamble through the streets in groups, strange noises and horrible smells come out of nowhere, and random violence erupts across the city.

Then, there’s The Library. People can come to The Library to deposit their own writings, be it notes, journals, scribbled manifestos or more. There is one big rules, though: no novels. Anyone can go to this strange place and read whatever they want, though it is all “true, authentic documents, reflecting the real spirit of the people.” For a small fee, readers can even get the contact information of the authors.

At first, De Maria introduces the strangeness gently. Everything is so subtle at first that you can hardly believe that madness is beginning to infect Turin. Slowly, surely, it builds to obscene levels — until it abruptly ends.

Well, maybe. An unnamed narrator investigates what, in his time, has become an unspoken legend. People throughout Turin don’t want to speak of the horrors of that not-so-long-ago time, yet cannot help themselves.

Inspired by the neo-fascist movements and general unease and violence that infected Italy in the 1970s, The Twenty Days of Turin feels more than prescient in our own troubled times.