Rave4ColumnsDi Benedetto’s writings exert a subliminal influence on me: under their spell, time lags, and the world of people and things acquire a blurred, phantasmagoric tenor ... The book’s great virtue is that, using austere and bluntly cryptic prose, it builds the feeling of an unnamed and perhaps unnamable menace dwelling just behind the veil of words and suspends us in a state that doesn’t dissipate when we close its covers—of someone who, rising from a particularly intense nightmare, doesn’t know the extent to which, or even whether, she has woken up.
