Maledetti (The Forsaken)

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This bizarre horror story has some moments of real power, but what
really chilled my blood were the four words, “end of part one,” at
the bottom of the last page, which promised another volume of clumsy
narration, erratic style, laughable characterization, and
conspiracy-theory cosmology.

Roenoak University, located within 90 miles of Indianapolis, is
controlled by Satanists; those who thrive there have consented to
domination by evil forces. The few who resist are beaten, buried alive,
given loathesome hallucinations, and so on, to break their spirit and
force their corruption. Some of these scenes of persecution are eerily
effective, but they offer very slender compensation for slogging through
the rest.

I think I detect signs of H.P. Lovecraft’s influence, but for all his
flaws, Lovecraft had a much better grasp of the language and of the
possibilities of first-person narration. Despite the extravagance of his
horrors, he knew what was credible and what wasn’t. Gualtieri, in
contrast, doesn’t seem to care: one of his characters “specialized
in psychiatry by memorizing everything Freud had written”; another, an
absurdly named Roman Catholic priest from India, Dinjeebar Oopsdedei, is
barely competent to hear confession. The worst are the Satanists, said
to be incredibly powerful and yet unable to destroy those who hold out
against them. Some of this is evidently intended to be meaningfully
ironic, but the net result is murky and incoherent. Even fans of horror
fiction will not find much here.