Sasso

Rating:
Summary: A Startling Read
Review: Sasso is one of the strangest and most interesting books I've read in a long while. It's part thriller, part murder mystery, part love story, part anthropological study of the closed-in world of southern Italy - and then it's not any of those, either. What Sasso is is an astonishing tale of the deepest dark spaces inside of us all. The ones that will always be "unfathomable." I found Sasso funny, dark, thrilling, full of textures, atmosphere and sweltering heat. The book keeps catching my attention, as much as it catches my breath.

Rating:
Summary: I was unprepared for..
Review: the journey the author has mapped out for his readers. Like the characters in this novel, I also fell prey to the winding ways of Mancanzano that lead to the darkest corners of human nature. I can't wait to read what James Sturz has planned for us next.

Rating:
Summary: Superb tale
Review: The narrator, one of four research scientists to arrive at Mancanzano, Italy to study the prehistoric frescoes found in the nearby caves, writes a letter to his pregnant New York girlfriend relating events here. However, intruding on the scientific efforts is two dead naked teenagers just beneath the drawings. Their mouths are filled with the mystically medicinal grounded form of tufa that seems to be everywhere.

As they carefully work with the frescoes, the quartet finds more pictures this time of bleeding cherubim alongside dead naked people, but soon more teens die in the caves. As the narrator learns more about the local legends and history of Mancanzano, he falls into a local darkness that teeters on the insane. He adds to his perplexity when he begins a heated affair with a member of the "asylum". When their passion cools, they squabble until she is found dead and he is accused of her homicide.

SASSO is at its best when it focuses on the irony of the lofty narrator being sucked into the mystical mayhem and insanity of the locals. When the story line tries to turn into a philosopher's stone, it bogs down as "tufa" ostentatious. James Sturz shows he has a tremendous gift especially providing a murder mystery with a touch of the mystic and plenty of the absurd, but SASSO, though entertaining and darkly humorous, tries to be too much when it turns reflectively intellectual. Still this reviewer looks forward to more works from Mr. Sturz, an obvious talent.

Harriet Klausner