Let the Mountains Be My Grave

Tacchi’s unsuccessful debut novella opens in WWII Italy, where protagonist Veleno is introduced with his rifles in position to kill Nazis. Twenty-year-old Veleno is motivated by vengeance after the murders of his uncle and father by fascists, and he’s armed with healing magic taught to him by his late grandmother and drawn from the Chthonic deity Angitia. He and his companion, Rame, join with Mosca, a sniper, and Irma, a professor, to form a task force that will intercept a Nazi truck carrying a weapon north of Montecassino—but of course things don’t go as planned, sparking much violent action. The story struggles from consistently cartoonish dialogue (“ ‘Your screams... mmmh, they’ll be music!’ ‘Fuck you, Nazi pig.’ ”) and awkward exposition, and tends toward heavy-handedness in its depictions of Italian deities. The eventual conflation of Nazism and occultism, meanwhile, risks minimizing evils committed sans supernatural help. Readers can safely skip this one. (May)