You, Bleeding Childhood

New Yorker, “The Best Books of 2023”

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.