Alessandro Manzetti's Blog, page 37

NARAKA Reviewed by author Paul Dale Anderson

My novel NARAKA - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN BREEDING (Independent Legions, May 2018) reviewed by author Paul Dale Anderson:
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"Naraka reads like a demented cross between James Joyce and Piers Anthony novels, with a touch of Richard Thomas thrown in for good measure.
Heaven above, hell below. Heaven’s a lie. Hell is real. In the Hindu and Buddhist mythology, Naraka is one of the ancient Sanskrit names for hell. There are many hells. The cunt is also a hell, “the hell from which monsters come out.”
After the super-rich military-industrialists turned earth into a hell where nothing grows, they built a new underground detention center on the moon where they incarcerate violent criminals and socially-undesirables and force them to procreate before slicing and dicing them into food or fuel.
The author warns readers from the beginning that there are multiple timelines and multiple narrators in Naraka. Definitely not for the fainthearted, this novel is hardcore horror. Highly-recommended for its daring and brilliant use of language and myth. 5/5"

HANS E GRETA; Racconto inedito disponibile gratuitamente ad HALLOWEEN

Il giorno di Halloween potrete leggere gratuitamente, su Horror Magazine e sul Sito Web Independent Legions, il racconto HANS E GRETA scritto a quattro mani con Paolo Di Orazio. Il racconto sarà pubblicato anche in lingua inglese sul Sito Web della Horror Writers Association, per la serie 'Halloween Haunts'.

MONSTERS OF ANY KIND Anthology Photo Gallery

Available at Amazon  MONSTERS OF ANY KIND Anthology (Independent Legions), edited by me and Daniele Bonfanti, including 18 stories (and 18 monsters) by: Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow, Edward Lee, Jonathan Maberry, Lucy Taylor, Owl Goingback, Damien Angelica Walters, Bruce Boston, Cody Goodfellow, Monica J. O'Rourke, Michael Bailey, Erinn L. Erinn Kemper, Mark Alan Miller, Jess Landry, Santiago Eximeno, Gregory Norris, Greg Sisco, and Michael Gray Michael Baughan.
Cover art by Wendy Saber Core, interior illustrations by Stefano Cardoselli.
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Buy your Paperback copy of the book at Amazon
Buy your Kindle copy of the book at Amazon Photo Gallery

Naraka - Bizzarre Video Review by B.L.U.R.B.

NARAKA - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN BREEDING (Novel) - Bizzarre Video Review by B.L.U.R.B. - Ben Loves Unusual Reviews & Books
Buy your copy (paperback and kindle) at Amazon: 

Available at Amazon MONSTERS OF ANY KIND Anthology

Available at Amazon  MONSTERS OF ANY KIND Anthology (Independent Legions), edited by me and Daniele Bonfanti, including 18 stories (and 18 monsters) by: Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow, Edward Lee, Jonathan Maberry, Lucy Taylor, Owl Goingback, Damien Angelica Walters, Bruce Boston, Cody Goodfellow, Monica J. O'Rourke, Michael Bailey, Erinn L. Erinn Kemper, Mark Alan Miller, Jess Landry, Santiago Eximeno, Gregory Norris, Greg Sisco, and Michael Gray Michael Baughan.
Cover art by Wendy Saber Core, interior illustrations by Stefano Cardoselli.
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Buy your Paperback copy of the book at Amazon
Buy your Kindle copy of the book at Amazon

Revealed the Honorable Mentions of Ellen Datlow's 'The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten'

Ellen Datlow has released the long list of her Honorable Mentions for Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten (for works published in 2017), and I'm delighted that the following 5 poems of mine found a place on it:

Manzetti, Alessandro “No Mercy,” (poem) No Mercy.
Manzetti, Alessandro “The Maiden,” (poem) No Mercy.
Manzetti, Alessandro “Yuki,” (poem) No Mercy.
Manzetti, Alessandro “Yuki’s Monster,” (poem) No Mercy.
Simon, Marge & Manzetti, Alessandro “Night of Tears,” HWA Poetry Showcase IV.

Also, as a editor, I'm glad that the following 10 stories from the Anthology 'The Beauty of Death Vol. 2' (edited by me and Jodi Renee Lester for Independent Legions) received an Honorable Mentions:

Marge Simon “The Old Woman and the Sea,” The Beauty of Death volume II.
Lucy A. Snyder “Antumbra,” The Beauty of Death volume II.
John Langan “A Song Only Partially Heard,” The Beauty of Death II.
Nicola Lombardi “Even the Stars Fall,” The Beauty of Death II
Lisa Morton “The Wash,” The Beauty of Death II.
Arnzen, Michael A. “Fresh Catch,” The Beauty of Death II.
Michael Bailey “Underwater Ferris Wheel,” The Beauty of Death volume II.
Simon Bestwick, “The Tarn,” The Beauty of Death volume II.
Bonfanti, Daniele “The Gorge of Children,” The Beauty of Death volume II.
Daniel Braum “The Fourth Bell,” The Beauty of Death volume II

Congratulatios to all, and thank you very much Eto llen Datlow
Read the full Honorable Mentions list at Ellen Datlow's Website

'The Garden of Delight' reviewed by Women Write About Comics online journal

To celebrate Killercon Austin's inaugural Splatterpunk Awards, Women Write About Comics online journal reviewed all the finalists works in each category, included my story collection The Garden of Delight (Comet Press, 2017), nominated for 'Best Collection' category. Here's the review:

Summarising the plots of the stories in this collection seems pointless. The title story is about a couple looking for the ghost of their dead child in a post-apocalyptic world. “The Man Who Ate Flowers” is a cannibal killer’s life story. “By the Sea” is about a murderer trawling the streets of Rome in search of transgender sex workers. And “Regnum Congo” is a sexed-up reworking of Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House.” But none of these descriptions really captures how Alessandro Manzetti’s fiction works.
The Garden of Delight’s stories are written dreams, where narrative logic inevitably gives way to surreal transformation, as when the reader is confronted with such scene-setting descriptions as this: “Ghosts of tits, dicks, electric necklaces, and portable pussies walk on Molle Bridge, illuminating the motionless marble archangels of the old Rome with severed wings.”
Behind this hallucinatory prose, Manzetti mixes splatter with punk in equal measure. He explores the cracks in society: a twilight world of depraved criminals, victims of oppression, and a philosophy where sex, violence, and religion are irretrievably tangled. He also blurs together elements of various speculative genres to create his dark dreamscapes, allowing the surreal symbolism of magical realism, the city-dwelling beasts of urban fantasy and the alluring technology of cyberpunk to each play their part.
One of the best examples of this genre-mixing is “The Massacre of the Mermaids.” This story takes place in a dystopian Rome where a “She-Pope” reigns supreme with transgender amazons providing muscle. Unfortunate women are surgically transformed into mermaids, which are used as prey in gladiatorial combat, and gathered spectators munch on meatballs made from the women’s detached legs. Some of the motifs in this story are familiar from horror (such as cannibalism), while others are more idiosyncratic (such as the casting of transgender women as weird futuristic priestesses, an idea that turns up repeatedly in the book.) Fragments of various post-apocalyptic sci-fi epics fade in and out of each other like memories of a dream, with a dream-logic treatment of gender politics running through the middle.
The book’s tone is consistent across its twenty stories. Even tales that initially seem to be more grounded later slide into the same dreamlike prose: witness how “Long Hair’s Inferno,” which starts out as an apparently straightforward retelling of Custer’s last stand, comes up with lines like “the camp is on fire and jaguars, big and small, are frying blue men in pans.” The Garden of Delight sometimes seems less like a collection of short stories and more like one blurred-together narrative. The setting may change from the Crusades to the dystopian future of the She-Pope, but the surrounding world—along with the narrative voice—remains essentially the same.
The Garden of Delight is a heady volume, and some readers may find it a little overwhelming. But taken at the right pace, Manzetti’s prose is a fine example of the beauty that can be found in the grotesque. Buy the book at Amazon (paperback and kindle edition)

Parte oggi il KillerCon 2018

Inizia oggi la convention internazionale KILLERCON 2018, che si terrà ad Austin, Texas, fino al 26 Agosto.
Nel programma ricco di eventi, consultabile sul sito web della manifestazione, spicca la cerimonia di premiazione (domani, Sabato 25 Agosto) degli Splatterpunk Awards 2018, con in lizza la mia raccolta di racconti in lingua inglese THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT (Comet Press, 2017), che ha ricevuto una nomination nella categoria 'Best Collection'.
​Il libro è stato pubblicato anche in Italiano, da Independent Legions, col titolo Il Giardino delle Delizie, edizione collection, tiratura limitata e copie numerate, con contenuti extra, illustrato da Stefano Cardoselli, disponibile sullo Store dell'Editore.

Durante la convention, sempre Sabato 25 Agosto, l'ospite d'onore Lucy Taylor presenterà l'antologia di racconti MONSTERS OF ANY KIND, a cura del sottoscritto e di Daniele Bonfanti, in uscita a fine settembre 2018, in lingua inglese, per Independent Legions (che è anche Sponsor del KillerCon 2018) contenente opere di David J. Schow, Ramsey Campbell, Edward Lee, Jonathan Maberry e tanti altri grandi autori. Durante la presentazione del libro, Lucy Taylor leggerà dall'antologia, in anteprima, il suo nuovo racconto 'Sucklings' Nelle goodie bags che saranno consegnate ai partecipanti della convention, saranno inserite diverse copie dell'edizione in lingua inglese del mio romanzo NARAKA (opera disponibile anche in lingua italiana, su Amazon)

Recensione di SAMSARA a cura di Andrea Zanotti

Online su Infiniti Mondi la recensione di Andrea Zanotti del mio ultimo romanzo SAMSARA - L'Isola degli Urlanti
Dalla recensione:
(...) Che dire, ogni romanzo del Battiago riesce a turbarmi. E non solo per i contenuti spinti, estremi e per l’abilità con la quale l’autore riesce a metterli in scena, ma per l’atipicità del suo scrivere. La capacità di distinguersi che caratterizza le penne maestose, che non può non incantare chi come me si balocca con la scrittura e non può che rimanere ammirato e ammettere l’invidia profonda per una tale capacità. Non siamo innanzi a un mero esercizio di stile di chi possiede classe e si perde nel mettersi in mostra, non è certo questo il caso, la narrazione procede magniloquente, roboante, sopra le righe dal principio alla conclusione, ma la storia rimane, gli intrecci si svelano ridestando il lettore oramai rapito e ipnotizzato da questo universo andato letteralmente a puttane. A mio avviso si tratta di un’opera completa, di spessore oltre che magistralmente scritta. (…)

Leggi la recensione completa su Infiniti Mondi
Acquista il libro su Amazon

Intervista su Dimensione Parallela

Walter Fabia mi ha intervistato per il suo blog Dimensione Parallela. Leggi L'intervista