China Miéville’s epic world building meets Charlee Jacob’s beautifully brutal prose. Shanti is a horrifying look into the post-apocalyptic Earth and just what humans will do to each just to survive.
The orphan sisters, Justine and Juliette, are entrusted to the care of the Sainte Marie College headed by Madame Desroches, a transgender matron of the infamous and dystopian neighborhood Paris South 5, the Hyper-Bronx of the French capital. The two sisters will become prey and predators of a brutal and hopeless world, where everybody wants to become a citizen of the mythical Shanti, the Holy City. Shanti is an artificial paradise, the last chance of a decent living following the apocalypse due to the radioactive meteor Uxor77. Now the Earth is characterized only by the annihilation of animal protein, the spread of cannibalism and brutal sexual deviances.
The destinies of the two girls take shape in an apocalyptic Paris, with its red-light districts and the fashionable restaurants of human flesh, and then in the desert, among the subhuman menageries of the barren, desperate Mesoamerican Republic.
Flamingo is a wicked creature that has survived the time to become the queen of Shanti, the Eldorado of Sex, whose heretic and sadist court, pulls the strings of everybody’s fate. But the New France’s criminal underworld as well as a powerful and cruel organization that control technology, the world markets of new synthetic drugs and the clandestine trade in human flesh, want to get their hands on the Holy City.
Justine and Juliette become involved in different games of power; one will become predator, the other prey, always looking for faith, in spite of everything. What fate awaits them? Shanti is written as an homage to the famed sisters of the Marquis de Sade’s infamous novel Justine, as a futurization of that famous, heretic masterpiece.
Reviews
"Alessandro Manzetti's NARAKA is a dark, frightening and heartbreaking novel that takes an unflinching look at evil and courage. Highly recommended!"
--Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of GLIMPSE and V-WARS
"I am unable to think of a more original novel in any genre. I've never taken LSD and now I don't have to; after finishing NARAKA, its hideous, chimeral imagery raced ceaseless Tartarean circles in my brain, like a spew of appalling living things, and I was helpless to stop it. This book is a must-read for fans of any type of heavy-weight non-mainstream fiction, an unparalleled literary carpet-bombing that will warp your mind for some time to come."
--Edward Lee, author of THE BIGHEAD and WHITE TRASH GOTHIC
Links to the book
Amazon: http://mybook.to/shanti
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shanti-alessandromanzetti/1131298514 Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/shanti-the-sadist-heaven/id1460442662 Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/935021
About the Author
Alessandro Manzetti (Rome, Italy) is a Bram Stoker Award-winning (and 7-time nominee) author, editor, and translator of horror fiction and dark poetry whose work has been published extensively in Italian, including novels, short and long fiction, poetry, essays, and collections.
English publications include his novel Naraka - The Ultimate Human Breeding, the collections The Garden of Delight, The Massacre of the Mermaids, The Monster, The Bad and the Ugly (with Paolo Di Orazio) and the poetry collections No Mercy, Eden Underground, War (with Marge Simon) Sacrificial Nights (with Bruce Boston) and Venus Intervention (with Corrine de Winter).
His story collection The Garden of Delight has been nominated for the Splatterpunk Awards 2018.
He edited the anthologies The Beauty of Death Vol 1, The Beauty of Death Vol. 2 - Death by Water (with Jodi Renee Lester) and Monsters of Any Kind (with Daniele Bonfanti), Splatterpunk Awards 2019 nominee. His stories and poems have appeared in Italian, USA, and UK magazines, such as Dark Moon Digest, Splatterpunk Zine, Disturbed Digest, The Horror Zine, Illumen, Devolution Z, Recompose, Polu Texni, Nothing’s Sacred Vol. 4, and anthologies such as Splatterpunk Forever, Best Hardcore Horror of the Year Vol. 2 and Vol. 4, Bones III, Rhysling Anthology (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018), HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. 3 and 4, The Beauty of Death Vol 1 and 2, Mar Dulce, I Sogni del Diavolo, Danze Eretiche Vol. 2, Il Buio Dentro, and the forthcoming anthologies Midnight Under the Big Top (Cemetery Dance), Rhysling Antology 2019 and Sorrow Anthology.
He is an HWA Active member, a former HWA Board of Trustees member, and lives in Trieste (Italy)
Visit his website: www.battiago.com