Naraka

by Alessandro Manzetti

Welcome to New Belmarsh Penitentiary, a space farm of human meat, where Slicers dispatch fleeing captives and organs are mechanically excised from the flesh and kept alive. Torture and death in a thousand variations await the dying and the damned. After the impact of radioactive, disease-bringing meteorite Uxor77 (presenting a new Year 0), a slow but unrelenting apocalypse is triggered. Earth is poisoned, agriculture compromised. In an already over-exploited environment, this leads to a global food crisis. Only the rich can afford what little vegetables and meat remain clean. Cannibalism is just around the corner.
In the year 41 post-Uxor, countries like New France are heavily militarized and entire districts out of control, such as South Paris 5, governed by the criminal boss Big Blue, an “artist” who collects sadistic human installations. The wealthy dine at illegal cannibalistic restaurants like Le Sphinx Tatoué, where they can have sadistic sex and unorthodox meals with “disposable” prostitutes, while mutated rats compete with human wretches on the streets for scraps of food.
New Moon Corporation is making a profit out of this mess, experimenting with new drugs and breeding humans to produce meat for the rich. To this end, NARAKA, aka New Belmarsh Penitentiary, is built on the Moon, a way to control the spreading criminality by removing from the planet the worst scum of Earth. This includes Kiki Léger, former South Paris 5 prostitute turned professional assassin. In Naraka, inmates are slaughtered, packaged, and delivered to Earth in cans, while a lunatic pedophile priest makes up a new heretic religion. Even worse things happen in the lower layers of the underground, hive-like structure …

Genres: Horror

328 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 15, 2018

About the author

Alessandro Manzetti (Rome, Italy) is a Three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author, editor, scriptwriter and essayst of horror fiction and dark poetry whose work has been published extensively (more than 40 books) in Italian and English, including novels, short and long fiction, poetry, essays, graphic novels and collections.
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English publications include his novels Shanti - The Sadist Heaven (2019) and Naraka - The Ultimate Human Breeding (2018), the novella The Keeper of Chernobyl (2019), the collections The Radioactive Bride (2020), The Garden of Delight (2017), The Monster, the Bad and the Ugly (2016, with Paolo Di Orazio), and The Massacre of the Mermaids (2015), the poetry collections Dancing with Maria's Ghost (2021), Whitechapel Rhapsody (2020), The Place of Broken Things (2019, with Linda D. Addison), War (2018, with Marge Simon), No Mercy (2017), Sacrificial Nights (2016, with Bruce Boston) Eden Underground (2015), Venus Intervention (2014, with Corrine de Winter), and the graphic novels Calcutta Horror (2019), Her Life Matters (2020) and The Inhabitant of the Lake (2021), and the Guide '150 Exquisite Horror Books' (2021)
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He edited the anthologies The Beauty of Death (2016), The Beauty of Death Vol. 2 - Death by Water (2017, with Jodi Renee Lester) and Monsters of Any Kind (2018, with Daniele Bonfanti)
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His stories and poems have appeared in Italian, USA, UK, Australian, Polish and Russian magazines, such as Weird Tales Magazine, Dark Moon Digest, Splatterpunk Zine, Disturbed Digest, Space and Time, The Horror Zine, Illumen, Devolution Z, Hinnom, Recompose, Polu Texni, Nothing's Sacred, Okolica Strachu, and anthologies such as Splatterpunk Forever, The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 13, Classic Monsters Unleashed, Best Hardcore Horror of the Year Vol. 2, 4, 5, 6, The Big Book of Blasphemy, Midnight Under the Big Top, Bones III, Rhysling Anthology (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. 3 and 4, The Beauty of Death Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, World of Light and Darkness, One of Us, Professor Charlatan Bardot's Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World, Tales of the Lost Vol. 3, Hope: Poems of Hope and Resilience From the Pandemic, Sorrow and many others

He edited the anthologies The Beauty of Death (2016), The Beauty of Death Vol. 2 - Death by Water (2017, with Jodi Renee Lester) and Monsters of Any Kind (2018, with Daniele Bonfanti)

Awards and Nominations:
• Bram Stoker Awards 2021 winner
• Bram Stoker Awards 2019 winner
• Bram Stoker Awards 2015 winner
• SFPA Elgin Awards 2019 winner
• Bram Stoker Awards 2019 three-time nominee
• Bram Stoker Awards 2018 nominee
• Bram Stoker Awards 2017 two-time nominee
• Bram Stoker Awards 2016 two-time nominee
• Bram Stoker Awards 2014 nominee
• Splatterpunk Awards 2019 nominee
• Splatterpunk Awards 2018 nominee
• Rhysling Awards 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 nominee
• Elgin Awards 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 nominee
• This is Horror Awards 2017 nominee
• HWA Specialty Press Awards 2017 winner (as CEO of Independent Legions Press)

Furthermore, he received honorable mentions (for stories and poems) in Ellen Datlow's 'The Best Horror of the Year' Vol. 7-8-9-10-12-13
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​He is the CEO & Founder of Independent Legions Publishing, editor of 'Molotov Magazine' (in Italian), HWA Active member and a former HWA Board of Trustees member. In 2021 he served the Science Fiction Poetry Association as the Rhysling Award Chair.

He lives in Trieste, Italy
website: www.battiago.com

Reviews

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 5 out of 5]

An arresting vision of a future so alien that you can't help but feel dirty. Buckets of blood, gore, pus, cum, meat, mucus, battery acid, shit and piss. That's not an exaggeration. A frightening and filthy dystopia where everyone and everything is on a conveyor belt leading to some kind of neverending doom, from the 'human chicken farms' on the moon to the hybridization of sexual slavery and culinary experiments to the delight of the geisha goddess Sibel. Life is cheaper than a McDonald's dollar menu in this kaleidoscope of vulgarity. It's the Marquis de Sade taking a gamble on steampunk.

[Paul Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naraka reads like a demented cross between James Joyce and Piers Anthony novels, with a touch of Richard Thomas thrown in for good measure.
Heaven above, hell below. Heaven’s a lie. Hell is real.
In the Hindu and Buddhist mythology, Naraka is one of the ancient Sanskrit names for hell. There are many hells. The cunt is also a hell, “the hell from which monsters come out.”
After the super-rich military-industrialists turned earth into a hell where nothing grows, they built a new underground detention center on the moon where they incarcerate violent criminals and socially-undesirables and force them to procreate before slicing and dicing them into food or fuel.
The author warns readers from the beginning that there are multiple timelines and multiple narrators in Naraka. Definitely not for the fainthearted, this novel is hardcore horror. Highly-recommended for its daring and brilliant use of language and myth.

[Monique Snyman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alessandro Manzetti does it again with NARAKA: The Ultimate Human Breeding! Entertaining, gritty, and unforgettable, this tale is definitely not for the faint of heart. Still, I found it an exceptional novel, with a great plot.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a bizarre, and weird story. It was like a sci-fi / horror story written by Marquis De Sade.

[Francesca Giardiello · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alessandro Manzetti continua nella creazione di un mondo futuristico dove gli esseri umani sopravvivono fra innesti, radiazioni e a loro stessi. La crisi alimentari è altissima, la criminalità anche e la soluzione per la sopravvivenza diventa un business in cui la protagonista, la killer Kiki, si troverà invischiata.
La prosa di Manzetti rasenta la poesia, la lettura scorre agile e veloce spezzettata sapientemente in capitoli che permettono di seguire la protagonista insieme a vari personaggi, così da fornire un'idea di quanto sia profonda e poetica la perversione in questo mondo.
Senza alcuna censura, Naraka procede legando il lettore a un universo da cui non potrà fare più ritorno.

[Karl Drinkwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a difficult read for me. Not the content, in terms of horror and gore, but the style. It was tricky to know which parts were figurative and which were literal. If you take almost any paragraph from the book, I would struggle to parse it clearly. There was one action scene that I read three times, and still couldn't visualise based on the description.

There are great ideas in here though, and lots of horror. I read on, even if I occasionally skipped bits that were overly dense or confusing. I wanted to know more. There was always this nagging feeling that there was some brilliance in here, but the structure and prose tarnished it. Maybe that's intentional, I can't ignore that possibility. Form and theme merging. But as a reader, it was a trek sometimes.

Let me take one example of how the structure confused things for me. The chapters chop and change between perspectives and times. There's only one recurring character (Kiki) who has anything like a traditional arc and story. Some chapters it's not even clear who is supposed to be speaking. Twice in the book we are given lists of characters with their crimes and background. But at those points we have no investment in those names in lists; they blur together. So when any of those characters reappear chapters later as just a name, you either have to flick back to the list, or just accept a kind of blur where no-one feels distinguishable. That's a totally different approach to introducing characters as they appear, through their action and dialogue. For me it didn't work, since it pushed me out of the narrative many times, breaking connection and interest. Which again brings me back to the idea that, with just a tiny bit more structure and signposting and reigning in some of the style, we'd have had a far more horrifying book. Without that connection, some scenes are just reduced to almost comic depictions of violence or brutality. With the connection, they would have been many times more impactful.

That's just my opinion. And Naraka stuck in my mind. That's a rarity - I only normally finish one out of three books, because so many tales are overfamiliar rehashes. This has originality. At its best, it brought to mind the feelings I had when I read The Tank (La Cisterna), by Nicola Lombardi. Unfortunately, Naraka, with its fragmented narrative, also fragmented my connection and investment. But if you like interesting styles and rule-breaking deviant literature, then Naraka may well take you to hell.

[Regina Rossa · Rating 5 out of 5]

G. J. Ballard (un autore che mi figuro per nulla sconosciuto a Battiago) sosteneva che la violenza civile, la pornografia e la diffusione delle droghe fossero l'espressione della maturazione di una civiltà. "Maturazione" da intendersi scevra di qualunque connotazione etica, quanto invece stadio evolutivo-sociale in cui l'energia disordinata della psiche umane viene proiettata a ridefinire il mondo esterno con tutto il suo carico di irrisolti e pulsioni primordiali mai disinnescate. Esemplare, in questo senso è il ciclo di Cocaine Nights.

È da queste pulsioni, cui fa corona un'antropofagia eretta a sistema dalla barbarie ipertecnologica, che parte Battiago per presentarci un affresco iperviolento, minaccioso, irredento e viscerale, senza concessioni al lettore.
E che, tuttavia, supera il rischio di rimanere inchiodato alla contingenza della brutalità in virtù di una ridefinizione degli elementi costitutivi in una vera e propria gestalt estetica della violenza (una sorta di "Mostra delle atrocità", per restare in ambito ballardiano), e si trasforma in arte (liminare e voyeuristica finche si vuole) grazie anche alle ardite strutture che ricompongono lo spazio e il tempo della narrazione in un mosaico di storie, citazioni, immagini ed estemporaneità, senza che il "corso" principale (the main course, se mi si concede la boutade alimentare in inglese) ne venga diminuito, semmai impreziosito.

E il tutto sorretto da una scrittura d'alto bordo che come, le prostitute di lusso, lavora di fino ma senza mai perdere un'oncia di efficacia.

In un mondo dove gli esseri umani sono prodotti (carne in scatola, bambola neoprom, genetica per esperimenti, orifizio da dominare e straziare), l'unica forma di rapporto non gerarchico tra essi, alla fine, non può che essere una sparatoria. L'unica via per riassegnare loro, anche se per pochi secondi la dignità e la regalità che hanno perduto (o che è stata loro tolta).
A volte, un proiettile veicola in quei pochi secondi più significato di trent'anni di pseudovita da preda.
In questo senso, Kiki è il nostro bardo. Bardo che al ritmo di ferro e morte ci narra la ballata dei Tempi Cannibali.

[Enrico Ravelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ho appena finito di “divorare” questo romanzo dell’italianissimo Manzetti (aka Caleb Battiago). Sono rimasto letteralmente senza fiato come se avessi corso più volte i cento metri…in un mondo apocalittico. Più allucinato di Gene Wolfe del Ciclo del Nuovo Sole, sia nella linguistica che nel contenuto. Più visionario del Simmons di Hyperion ed Endymion, quasi, anzi, una sua controparte oscura e luciferina nel descrivere un mondo agli sgoccioli. Ti colpisce senza pietà come un diretto allo stomaco preso alla sprovvista. Scoiattolando tra prosa e poesia, tra differenti POV e flussi di coscienza, il romanzo sgretola ogni steccato morale insinuando dubbi sul vero valore dell’umanità. Sicuramente non un romanzo per “spiriti nobili” o “dolci benpensanti” ma altrettanto sicuramente una sfida da affrontare per chi ama la fantascienza anche nelle sue versioni più grim e dark.

[Luca Pelorosso · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abbandonato dopo le prime pagine

[Alessandro Hand-glider-Hawthorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my fav books ever ! (review to come)

( currently rereading ! still possibly the best book ive ever read )

[Lucio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quello che resta alla fine di questo romanzo non sono le atrocità di cui è pieno e che, a una prima occhiata, sembrano essere l'unico contenuto; quello che resta è un senso di perdita, perdita di umanità, di innocenza, di bellezza. Ed è questa la sensazione più forte che lega una narrazione esplosa in molteplici personaggi, linee narrative, assoli letterari, sottotrame e vicoli ciechi: il funerale di un'umanità che ha perso sé stessa, intrappolata in una spirale autodistruttiva senza fondo, che lotta futilmente per la sopravvivenza. Al di sotto della costruzione caotica, la trama principale risulta troppo lineare e poco più di un pretesto (resta il dubbio se servisse davvero una storia per raccontare un mondo senza futuro che sta divorando sé stesso), ma la visione che emerge è chiarissima e potente, uno specchio oscuro del nostro futuro e di noi stessi.