I’ve had the pleasure to meet Alessio “Alec” Gallerani during Modena Fantasy 2010, and I started to follow his work after that (he was already a well-known author before that date), appreciating his skills with storyline and his passion for page turning plots, often enriched with irony or smart dialogues. So I was quite interested in his first publication in English language, a small novel (more or less 95 pages), called Massacre in the Dark Forest. An earlier work, called Lituania when published for Italian market, translated by David Haughton, that, for my limited ability to assert such thing, did a really great work, recreating Gallerani atmospheres, but adding that english flavor to narration one would expect to find in this kind of literary gender.

This is the synopsis of the book:

216 A.D. is the year of Rome’s dramatic defeat by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae. In the same year, in the Litana Forest, in the Po Valley: Rome faces another “problem”…
We’re in 216 A.D., but we’re also in the present day. In a small village in the Po Valley, not far from Bologna, Laura possesses a rare ability: by simply touching an object she can summon up its distant past from the mists of time. Every night she is assailed by horrendous nightmares. Her gift only brings her anguish, which is why she doesn’t want to use it.
Gianrico, her ex-lover, a penniless archeologist, immerses himself in his work partly in an attempt to forget her, but deep down he is unable to resign himself to losing her. In a different time-span, but in the same place, a terrible violence unfolds: a massacre in the dark depths of a forest.
An epic battle, over which history has drawn the veil of “damnatio memoriae”, its only trace a brief passing mention by Livy. A tragedy in the LITANA FOREST, whose distant echo brings horror to the present…

If you want, you can buy this ebook on Amazon.com.