Try Not to Sleep

Strange things have been happening in the town: people suddenly fall asleep, without reason…

Baladine Bustamante, not yet thirty years old, writes and hosts a highly popular podcast called “De profundis.” In each episode, she invites her listeners to descend with her into the darkness where the human mind and nature plunge. It is in this abyss that the most terrifying and obscure (true) stories are born. After nearly three years of continuous work, she experiences a creative block. It is at this point that her brother, Nicolas, comes to her with a story told to him by Christian, a guy he met one night at a disco.

It’s a story that he asks her not to share with anyone, under any circumstances.

The story revolves around Christian’s hometown, Vulcri, located in the Calanchi Valley, perched on a hill and connected to the mainland by a suspended bridge over a chasm. In this town, its inhabitants suddenly fall asleep. That’s enough for Baladine to sense the presence of darkness and decide to go there. This marks the beginning of a journey that will take our protagonists — Baladine, her brother Nicolas, and their mysterious friend Virginia — much further, toward an ever-expanding crack, revealing a horror of shocking proportions.

• The intriguing darkness of the Etruscan afterlife world, with its rituals, symbols and esoteric culture, intertwines with the hallucinatory terrain of Cotard’s Syndrome – a psychiatric disorder characterised by the belief of being dead or having lost all vital organs to the extent that those who suffer from it completely deny their existence.
• A plot rich in terrifying hallucinations and increasingly sinister characters.
• Constantly oscillating between fiction and reality, spanning different temporal dimensions, it’s a psycho-thriller that disorients and profoundly challenges the sense of “certainty”.
• Set in Italy, with ties to the world of popular crime podcasts, written by an author who, like few others, excels at playing with genres and engaging a diverse readership.