Enthralled readers may never look at a swarm of butterflies the same way again after navigating the dark terrors of Their Monstrous Hearts, the English debut by Yigit Turhan, a Turkish author living in Italy. This startling gothic horror novel's dual timeline follows 20-year-old Riccardo, a destitute aspiring novelist in Paris who's suffering from writer's block, on his spellbinding trajectory to a desolate estate in Milan.
Riccardo has no idea what to expect after a stranger with bad burn marks, Maurizio, arrives at his apartment with a compelling message from Riccardo's grandmother Perihan, who willed him her property along with a butterfly collection. Although reluctant to make the trip for her funeral, he has no choice but to use the one-way train ticket to Milan after he can't meet his rent and the power is shut off. He is greeted by Licia, his grandmother's maid, who "appeared unchanged." On the other hand, the villa is in disrepair, including a greenhouse, "glass windows smeared with dirt and choked by intertwining, lifeless branches of plants long gone." Riccardo discovers his grandmother's handwritten journal, which is the novel's second narrative and becomes the core of their intertwined destinies.
Unsettling scenarios include an elixir of resurrection, a long-ago deadly circus fire, and tales of a Forest of Immortality near Mexico. The novel builds to a crescendo of grotesquerie and Jungian transformation. Nothing short of a collaboration between Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stephen King could have produced anything more luxuriantly atmospheric or ultimately disturbing--in a good way. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic