<p>The highly original and truly terrifying folk horror of Italy's Luigi Musolino was introduced to an international audience in the acclaimed <em>The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories</em>, 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.</p><p>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. 'The Last Box' tells of a grieving contortionist's plan to make contact with his dead trapeze artist wife by twisting his body into the abstruse angles of her mangled corpse. And in the title novella, after a little girl vanishes in a supermarket, her parents find a strange solace when they find a bottomless pit in their basement from which her laughter seems to echo - but the abyss's shimmering darkness is not what it seems ...</p><p>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.'</p><p>'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 <em>The Gypsy Spiders</em></p>