The Night Battles

by M.F. Bloxam

Historian Joan Severance returns to the Sicily of her childhood, ostensibly to do research in archives newly opened in the remote fortress town of Valparuta. In truth, her academic career lies in ruins behind her she has been relieved of her teaching duties at Brown University after assaulting a student. Unable to approach her own long-buried history of loss and displacement, Joan has become obsessed with the lost possessions of those long dead all the objects, furniture, clothing and tools she finds recorded in Renaissance probates. But Valparuta, Joan discovers, is haunted, too. Unseen hands vandalize its homes and streets; the archivist, Cosimo Chiesa, suffers invisible blows. As Joan's disturbed, hyper-intuitive mind falls increasingly under Valparuta's spell, the embattled Chiesa begins a subtle campaign of seduction and tutelage whose purpose at once shocking and inevitable will force Joan to confront her unacknowledged past. A spellbinding, fiercely original novel of love, intrigue and psychological suspense, The Night Battles maps landscapes real and imagined where dream and belief, memory and longing, desire and obsession converge.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

MF Bloxam lives on New Hampshire's seacoast with her husband and two cats.

Reviews

[Wisteria Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading The Night Battles, evokes dark forgotten memories from the past when monsters lived under beds and in closets. Psychologically awakening this book will stimulate your neurons to that time long ago when fantasy fogged reality.

Joan Severance, an anthropology professor at Brown University has reached an impasse in her career, her future in academia tenuous. Granted a sabbatical, she accepts a position in Valparuta, Sicily, to work as an archivist under the tutelage of Signor Chiesa. She soon becomes engrossed in her work, unearthing historical records. She begins reading about Piero Quagliata his life and then his untimely, unnatural death in 1552. Abruptly the files she sifts through lead no where, something is missing.

Joan becomes attracted to Chiesa. As their relationship deepens, she comes to know his horror with the night battles. In Valpurata you are either benandanti or malandanti, the workers of evil. The benedanti spend four times a year battling the witches. One morning she witnesses the leftover carnage from one of these night battles. Joan senses her appearance in Sicily is not coincidental.

The thrill of The Night Battles is reading the book and imagining the fantasy. It is illusion, mystical, magical and personal to the reader. Valpurata becomes Joan's rabbit hole, with fantasy and reality obscured as she learns the history of Piero and his relationship with the benandanti.

The author’s strength is her beautiful poetic phrasing. For example:

“Outside, the wind saws against the building like a train taking a curve.(103)
“I miss him so terribly that it seems he must have only set like a moon, gone below a certain horizon. I still feel the pull of his body.” (238)

The Night Battles commands your attention with mesmerizing intrigue and alluring appeal. M. F. Bloxam's novel is distinctly unusual, a thriller, tightly taut with tension. Bloxam is a sensualist with an acute sensory awareness that makes this book live.

[Wisteria Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading The Night Battles, evokes dark forgotten memories from the past when monsters lived under beds and in closets. Psychologically awakening this book will stimulate your neurons to that time long ago when fantasy fogged reality.[return][return]Joan Severance, an anthropology professor at Brown University has reached an impasse in her career, her future in academia tenuous. Granted a sabbatical, she accepts a position in Valparuta, Sicily, to work as an archivist under the tutelage of Signor Chiesa. She soon becomes engrossed in her work, unearthing historical records. She begins reading about Piero Quagliata his life and then his untimely, unnatural death in 1552. Abruptly the files she sifts through lead no where, something is missing.[return][return]Joan becomes attracted to Chiesa. As their relationship deepens, she comes to know his horror with the night battles. In Valpurata you are either benandanti or malandanti, the workers of evil. The benedanti spend four times a year battling the witches. One morning she witnesses the leftover carnage from one of these night battles. Joan senses her appearance in Sicily is not coincidental.[return][return]The thrill of The Night Battles is reading the book and imagining the fantasy. It is illusion, mystical, magical and personal to the reader. Valpurata becomes Joan's rabbit hole, with fantasy and reality obscured as she learns the history of Piero and his relationship with the benandanti.[return][return]The author s strength is her beautiful poetic phrasing. For example:[return][return] Outside, the wind saws against the building like a train taking a curve.(103)[return] I miss him so terribly that it seems he must have only set like a moon, gone below a certain horizon. I still feel the pull of his body. (238)[return][return]The Night Battles commands your attention with mesmerizing intrigue and alluring appeal. M. F. Bloxam's novel is distinctly unusual, a thriller, tightly taut with tension. Bloxam is a sensualist with an acute sensory awareness that makes this book live.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is tough to pin down…and that’s part of why I like it. The writing, pacing and plotting all have a delusional quality, a feeling of time being out of joint and perception being altered by the strange lack of focus and simultaneous pin point vision that exists only in dreams. I could feel the bleached bone Sicilian heat and smell the rotting melon in Valparuta’s alley ways. Bloxam’s voice is lyrical and poetic, sometimes obscure, and more than once I found myself rereading pages to make sure I understood what just happened because the action and description were so densely interwoven that it was easy to be blown away by the imagery, losing the plot point if I wasn’t paying close enough attention. And I think that’s part of the point. Nothing in this book will hit you over the head with a clue by four of explanation. The interactions between the characters are subtle and circumspect, with equal doses of veiled malice and cryptic knowledge. There is much unspoken in the village of Valparuta, for both the characters and the reader and it is in these spaces that the psyche of the characters is revealed. While this could have made for a nice, tidy thriller, with an outsider as a protagonist, there to discover and explain everything for the reader, Bloxam takes an insider approach by giving the heroine a past that links her to Sicily and demonstrates assuredly the dangers of uncovering the unspoken and the unspeakable. The characters are layered and complex, unlikeable and compelling, sometimes opaque but always interesting. This is not a horror story or a paranormal thriller; either of those descriptions are reductionist. This book is a psychological, character-driven maelstrom, this side of Faulkner’s inaccessibility and that side of Poe’s darkness. I like books that are challenging, books that need to be chewed on and digested, not tossed back like a shot. This book is a satisfying meal. Bon appetit.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pre-Christian fertility cult is alive and well in modern-day Valparuta, Sicily. The "Benandanti" still do battle with the "Melandanti"...in Night Battles..to ensure the success of the Harvest. I am in no way equipped to discuss the historical aspects of this book...so i point my finger in the direction of a title mentioned by the Author herself The Night Battles: Witches and Agrarian Cults in the sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg....there is also a Website for this book.....http://thenightbattles.com....

the Paranormal aspect of this book? Not the Laurell K Hamilton variety..no hunky weres and vamps..herein you will find Folklore still liviing..lying close to the living bones...herein you will also find two seriously flawed characters (the Romance angle, if you will)
............Joan: a failed American academic, trying to come to terms with her trashed career, her own past, her mother's death, her childhood in Sicily, to which she's returned in a last ditch effort at meaningful work

............Chiesa....the Man-of-Mystery...the Archivist of Valparuta....at whose behest Joan has landed in this Sicilian backwater.....Chiesa..a man with more secrets than is healthy for anyone to bear...is he, or is he not an actual Benandanti? or is he a flunky for the local Mafia (which no one names directly)?

who is using who(m) here? to what ends? the mutual obsession precludes any Romance-of-the- Doomed...in other words...HOLD THE HANKIES...neither of these people is likeable...too many sharp edges...Joan's tendency to ramble is annoying....but this trait works to the Author's purpose....which is to make a strange and compelling novel...one of the more Unusual i have read in the past year..and i am a Fool for the Unusual

4 Stars (and i look forward to the author's next effort..whenever)

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book. I was amazed at how Bloxam was able to create an atmosphere, so that it almost seemed like I could smell the pungent aromas of Sicily and feel the summer heat. Not to mention the dark, brooding, almost threatening air everywhere in the small town of Valparuta. When I allowed myself to really fall into the book, I was enthralled, and felt like I was taking an uncomfortable, but fascinating trip. If you expect to understand everything that's going on, you're not going to be happy here. The dialogue often seemed like there were whole parts of the conversation that were conducted outside of earshot, like I'd just missed part of what was said, so I was always a little lost. Also, there was some major use of a thesaurus. Difficult or obscure words were often used when a simpler language would have done just as well. It's obvious the author is greatly intelligent and has a large vocabulary, but at times it felt too much like showing off or lording such erudition over the reader. I never quite got a grasp of what was actually going on in the supposed "night battles" between good and evil spirits. Were you supposed to believe it was real? Were you supposed to believe those people believed it was real? What was really happening? In the end, it didn't really matter. I'm sure there's a lot that I missed, but I certainly enjoyed my time there. It just drew me in, so that I didn't really care where it was going or what was real and what was make-believe. A very different kind of novel.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work for a debut novel. This is a darkly stylish and enigmatic tale of an ostracized academic and her awakening into a higher spiritual calling. Yet be warned, for this calling harbors hidden demons that dwell both amongst and within it.

Having read the studies of Carlo Ginzburg, and being a student of bibliographyand antiquarian books, I can respect the considerable amount research that was neatly integrated into the story. All of this was achieved without losing the reader to specialized or jargonistic writing; and further, the plot carries enough action to keep the reader captivated. The poetic coloring of the text can become confusing at times, yet this confusion often adds a mental fog which creates the atmosophere of mystery embodied in the larger enigma of the narrative. The protaganists do have their redeeming qualities, but they often effortlessly fade into escapades of mild villainry. Overall, this is a great read; it has a "feel-good" bleakness to it. I would definitely recommend it to fellow Umberto Eco fans.

[Stephanie Griffin · Rating 2 out of 5]

M. F. Bloxam’s novel, THE NIGHT BATTLES, tells the tale of an unlikable woman, Joan Severance, who goes to Sicily to research probate inventories of the 1500s.
She becomes involved with the archivist and with the small town of Valparuta. The story goes back and forth between her time in Valparuta, her growing up in Sicily, and the life she left behind Brown University.
This could have been a great book, but the writing is hit and miss.
On the positive side, I was unaware that there was actually a small cult of people in the 1500s who believed in the supernatural claims made by the Valparuta villagers in this book, and so this has led me to educate myself about that.
~Stephanie

[Beth Hartnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a supernaturally charged novel full of intriguing characters, charged settings, and beautiful prose...look no further than The Night Battles by M.F. Bloxam. And make sure to check out the Acknowledgements...I'm honored to be included there by my amazing friend!!!! :)

[Permanent Press]

"Bloxam’s ornate prose is the perfect complement to her complex heroine and the creepy goings-on in this eerie and satisfying debut novel." -Publishers Weekly

[Lucie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read it because it took place in Sicily. DIDn't much care for the story, but I liked the author's use of language.