The highly original and truly terrifying folk horror of Italy’s Luigi Musolino was introduced to an international audience in the acclaimed The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and now at last an entire volume of the author’s best work – eight stories and three novellas – is available in English for the first time.

In ‘Lactic Acid’, a jogger takes an unfamiliar shortcut and quickly finds himself trapped in a nightmare from which there may be no escape. In ‘Uironda’, a strange urban legend overheard at a rest stop becomes a horrifying reality for one truck driver. In ‘The Carnival of the Stag Man’, a reporter sent to cover a village carnival will learn the terrible truth behind its origins when he encounters an ancient divinity in the woods. And in the title novella, after a little girl vanishes in a supermarket, her parents find a strange solace when they discover a bottomless pit in their basement from which her laughter seems to echo – but the abyss’s shimmering darkness is not what it seems . . .

Musolino’s tales, set among the plains and mountains of his native Piedmont, are uniquely Italian, but the darkness he probes is universal. As Brian Evenson writes in the introduction, ‘Musolino has a strong and original voice and uses it to get to some uniquely dark places. Rather than blood or gore, he’s ultimately interested in what’s truly terrifying: the vertiginous darkness that threatens to open up and swallow us. A darkness that calls to us, calls to us, until we can’t help but answer and stumble toward it.’

‘Luigi Musolino enters the territories of superstition and folklore knowing that fairy tales are always terrible and legends hide unspeakable truths. Small towns, supermarkets, apartments, schools, or farms: when horror touches reality, it becomes the only thing that exists. These stories have a distinctly European feel: there’s a sense of old but not quite forgotten rituals, a touch of Pan and the deities that still linger behind the haunted fields and forests.’—Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

‘Musolino will catch you in the meshes of his nightmarish landscapes and paranoid scenarios, his engrossing stories and powerful endings. He’s the real thing.’—Michael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student

‘An experience worthy of David Cronenberg, a sick and monstrous universe where authors like Barker and Ligotti would feel right at home.’—Nicola Lombardi, author of The Gypsy Spiders