After a painful breakup, Julie returns to Italy to claim her grandmother’s crumbling villa nestled in the hills of Tuscany. But Villa Concetta is host to more than just memories. What begins as unease slowly unravels into terror, as a dark presence that once touched her family now turns its gaze on her. Julie must uncover the truth about her inheritance, her bloodline, and the legacy her grandmother never meant to pass down, before she loses herself completely.
This was a highly effective and enjoyable genre novella. The main focus of this one is setting up a fantastic main character to follow in Julie, focusing on her rough personal and professional life in short order, so that the appeal of the return to her family home comes off as an intriguing pull, bringing us up to speed with her quite nicely in the first half. Getting to include the other factors in this case, from her memories of her grandmother who left everything to her in the inheritance, the relationship with her mother that seems to point to the strained fractures from their past, and the fun chemistry she has with her best friend that all put everything into order so that staying at the villa is even more appealing all sets the stage for a strong and immersive story.
Once it starts moving on to include the idea of something living in the villa with her, this generates some rather chilling encounters. The first few bits, mainly the scenes involving her becoming convinced that someone is there when they aren’t or believing that something is looking at her, start to incorporate some fine ghostly setpieces to hint that something’s there. That continues with the rest of the supernatural hauntings and interactions that take place in the second half where it becomes far more apparent something is in the house with her, including encounters with supernatural presences manipulating furniture, pressing on doors, talking with those staying at the house, or leaving spectral residue behind that occur not just with her but her friend that hint at something supernatural at the cause of the hauntings.
The fact that this all means this quiet, brooding, sorrow-filled type of haunting helps strongly to make the interactions a telling example of grief weighing someone down. With everything taking place after not just a break-up but also the news about the death of a beloved, if distant, family member, there’s a lot to say about what the hauntings mean once she arrives since the information revealed about her grandmother ties nicely into her similar grief about what’s going on in her life, this focuses nicely on the nature of grief. Since it all manages to tie into the reasoning for the hauntings, discovered in the course of the interactions with her friend, looking into what happened with her grandmother while she was staying there, everything is immensely well-thought-out and quite chilling as a result.
The finale, a wild and frantic exorcism sequence that initially focused on trying to expel the demonic entity within the house before turning into a genuine exorcism on a possessed individual, takes a wholly different and drastic tone from the rest of the novel. Working in a series of genre tropes, from the whites of the eyes, the raspy voices shouting plenty of disturbing epithets, and bodily contortion, all being contested by a spree of fiery Latin phrases designed to expel the demonic force at the center of everything. As a whole, this is an immensely entertaining sequence on its own that ends the book on a high note, but the way it comes out of nowhere compared to the quiet and reserved Gothic hauntings beforehand might be a bit of a weird stretch that might not appeal to all readers. Still, there’s quite a lot to enjoy here.
4.5/5
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