Sasso (Hardcover)

Amazon.co.uk Review
Dry heat has its own exhaustion, its own madness; the visiting academics in James Sturz's Sasso were always going to be outsiders in the closed-in South Italian society of Mancanzano, but the logic of events and the climate leads them to terrible conclusions. Mancanzano is a town whose inhabitants used to live in caves in the volcanic rock that surrounds it, and still use powdered rock to cool off or stave off hunger. A series of dead teenage couples are found intertwined in caves with frescoes painted onto the crumbling rock, with paint crammed into their dead mouths; the frescoes themselves, as they are progressively revealed, become more and more sinister. The unnamed narrator and his colleagues drift into ever more dangerous emotional entanglements with each other and the townsfolk around them, and the authorities flail around looking for explanations in more and more lunatic intellectual byways, and for scapegoats... This deeply atmospheric thriller takes place in the glare of the brightest sunlight, yet its heart is as gloomy as the darkest kind of noir fiction. There is a passionate doominess to every step along the way here as well as a constant wild comedy--Sasso is an impressive and original thriller. --Roz Kaveney

Review
The small Italian town of Mancanzano has remained relatively unchanged for centuries. The occupants cling to the past, still living in their myriad of cave homes, known locally as 'sassi', and quietly afraid of any changes that may upset the delicate balance of their lives. The discovery of the bodies of two young teenagers is disturbance enough, but when that discovery also unearths previously undiscovered frescoes in the caves, Mancanzano becomes a focal point for the international community. A team of experts descends on the village to investigate the frescoes and attempt to record the anthropological history of the area. In an attempt to preserve and understand the frescoes, thought to be of significant historical importance, the investigators are drawn into the Mancanzano way of life and the mysteries that surround it. When a number of other bodies are discovered, all found mysteriously murdered, the international team are placed under suspicion and forbidden from leaving the town. Other strange events occur and the local police become increasingly desperate and frustrated in their attempts to find the answers. This is an unusual novel. One part murder mystery, one part travelogue, highly erotic in places, it is also an analysis of human nature and its struggle with the fine line between good and evil. Written in the form of a letter by one of the anthropologists with whom we become intimately involved, it is through him we become acquainted with Mancanzano and the dilemmas it poses. Atmospheric and original. (Kirkus UK)

A cultural anthropologist journeys to a village in southern Italy to explore the hell of "sassi" (cave dwellings) and of his own desires. Sasso unfolds as a long letter the narrator writes to his pregnant girlfriend in New York City. Hauling the baggage of uncertain careers and troubled relationships, he and three others have come to Mancanzano to study the brilliant frescoes in a warren of prehistoric cave dwellings. Adorned by angels and saints, the frescoes now look down upon two dead, naked teenagers. Their teeth are chipped, their faces lacerated, the insides of their mouths caked with tufa, the porous, cool stone that turns up everywhere in Mancanzano (and, it seems, on nearly every page of this first novel). Ground up, the magical and medicinal stone becomes, variously, a talc that soaks up sweat or a dietary supplement that, if overused, turns into cement. Scraping away at the frescoes, the team uncovers images of bleeding cherubim and dead, gashed, nude humans. More teenagers, then dogs, turn up dead in the caves. Compiling an oral history of Mancanzano, the narrator finds his encounters turning equally dark. An old woman tells of going blind from staring at the sun for a vision of the Madonna. An old man exposes his flaccid genitals, then asks the narrator to hold him. Complying, the narrator supports the man as he defecates. In thrall to the violent and sensual life around him, the narrator begins a passionate affair with a young girl named Philippa,. Hinting that she may be pregnant, she reviles the narrator. The two begin hurling abuse at each other like lumps of tufa. Soon on trial for her murder, the narrator writes to his fiancee, expressing hope that his child will "understand the power of stone" in New York, "a city that is also composed of cells." An avalanche of portentous symbols, allusions, and tufa, tufa, tufa. (Kirkus Reviews)

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