Italy's
great chronicler of the macabre and of growing up geeky.
Long
before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy's most
beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found
it crawling with monsters.
Raised
on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate
universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers.
Compared to the horrors of real life, Long John Silver and Cthulhu made for
positively cuddly company; but little boys raised by beasts may well grow up
beastly--or never grow up at all. Waking or sleeping, the obsessions of Mari's
youth seem to haunt his every adult thought. You, Bleeding Childhood stands
as his first attempt to catalog this cabinet of wonders.
Cult
classics since their first publication, these loosely connected stories stand
as the ideal introduction to a fantasist on a par with Kafka,
Poe, and Borges.
