The Night Battles [Hardcover]

M. F. Bloxam (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 9, 2008

Historian Joan Severance returns to the Sicily of her childhood, ostensibly to do research in archives newly opened in the remote fortress town of Valparuta. In truth, her academic career lies in ruins behind her she has been relieved of her teaching duties at Brown University after assaulting a student. Unable to approach her own long-buried history of loss and displacement, Joan has become obsessed with the lost possessions of those long dead all the objects, furniture, clothing and tools she finds recorded in Renaissance probates. But Valparuta, Joan discovers, is haunted, too. Unseen hands vandalize its homes and streets; the archivist, Cosimo Chiesa, suffers invisible blows. As Joan's disturbed, hyper-intuitive mind falls increasingly under Valparuta's spell, the embattled Chiesa begins a subtle campaign of seduction and tutelage whose purpose at once shocking and inevitable will force Joan to confront her unacknowledged past. A spellbinding, fiercely original novel of love, intrigue and psychological suspense, The Night Battles maps landscapes real and imagined where dream and belief, memory and longing, desire and obsession converge.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bloxam delivers fine Sicilian literary horror in the vein of Tom Piccirilli and Sara Gran. When Joan Severance finds her career as an anthropology professor on the rocks, she returns to Sicily, her childhood home, and finds work as an archivist, performing research in the coastal village of Valparuta. Immediately, she is attracted to fellow archivist Cosimo Chiesa, who reacquaints Joan with Sicily's Mafia. (Years earlier, Joan's mother, a crusading anti-Mafia journalist, became a victim of their vengeance.) Paranormal forces are also at work: Joan learns of the benandanti, a fertility cult whose spirits battle evil witches to ensure a bountiful harvest. This spiritual struggle has continued until now, as Joan and Cosimo, a self-admitted benandanti, are thrust into the terrifying "night battles." Joan and Cosimo also discover a valuable Cadmus bible, clash with the mob and become star-crossed lovers. Bloxam's ornate prose is the perfect complement to her complex heroine and the creepy goings-on in this eerie and satisfying debut novel. (Dec.)
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From Booklist

Failed academic Joan Severance flees to Sicily to visit the extraordinary archives newly opened in the remote town of Valparuta. It is the country of her mother, a famous crime-scene photographer who was murdered by the Mafia. Joan is totally taken with chief archivist Cosimo Chiesa, a mysterious figure who appears to have a drug problem. Carrying emotional problems of her own, Joan finds a real kinship with Cosimo, who shares her passion for research and for old books, and the two become lovers. She slowly discovers that all of the men in the town, Cosimo chief among them, belong to the benandanti, a cult of spirits charged with protecting the harvest. He enters into “night battles” that leave him bruised, bloody, and exhausted. Then Joan learns that she herself seems to have a similar calling. Bloxam, in a highly original debut novel, slowly and skillfully deploys a violent alternate reality. And she renders the eerie happenings in such careful and elegant prose that the novel’s style becomes as much of an enticement as its substance. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: The Permanent Press; 1st NAP edition (December 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579621716
• ISBN-13: 978-1579621711
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,198,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

To experience The Night Battles online, go to www.thenightbattles.com.

M.F. Bloxam is the author of prize-winning short fiction and historical nonfiction, and is a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship grant from the NH State Council on the Arts.

Ms. Bloxam holds a BA in Theater and English and an MA in Anthropology, with some side trips into graduate work in English and playwriting. She has taught college English and Anthropology to American servicemen and women in Sicily, worked as a museum educator, and studied fine bookbinding with an eccentric couple in Berkeley, California. She lives on New Hampshire's seacoast.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Good vs Evil ????, November 17, 2009

By 

Judith A Loue "aphra b" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Battles (Hardcover)

A pre-Christian fertility cult is alive and well in modern-day Valparuta, Sicily. The "Benandanti" still do battle with the "Melandanti"...in Night Battles..to ensure the success of the Harvest. I am in no way equipped to discuss the historical aspects of this book...so i point my finger in the direction of a title mentioned by the Author herself The Night Battles: Witches and Agrarian Cults in the sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg....there is also a Website for this book.....[....]...

the Paranormal aspect of this book? Not the Laurell K Hamilton variety..no hunky weres and vamps..herein you will find Folklore still living..lying close to the living bones...herein you will also find two seriously flawed characters (the Romance angle, if you will)

............Joan: a failed American academic, trying to come to terms with her trashed career, her own past, her mother's death, her childhood in Sicily, to which she's returned in a last ditch effort at meaningful work

............Chiesa....the Man-of-Mystery...the Archivist of Valparuta....at whose behest Joan has landed in this Sicilian backwater.....Chiesa..a man with more secrets than is healthy for anyone to bear...is he, or is he not an actual Benandanti? or is he a flunky for the local Mafia (which no one names directly)?

who is using who(m) here? to what ends? the mutual obsession precludes any Romance-of-the- Doomed...in other words...HOLD THE HANKIES...neither of these people is likeable...too many sharp edges...Joan's tendency to ramble is annoying....but this trait works to the Author's purpose....which is to make a strange and compelling novel...one of the more Unusual i have read in the past year..and i am a Fool for the Unusual

4 Stars (and i look forward to the author's next effort..whenever) ( )

5.0 out of 5 stars Phenomenal, a Mind-Altering Experience, May 4, 2009

By 

WordShop - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Battles (Hardcover)

M.F. Bloxam's novel "The Night Battles" is phenomenal, a mind-altering experience. It's set in Sicily, but almost immediately I had the sense of entering a dreamscape. The leading character, Joan Severance, is a tough-minded, discredited American academic in Ray-Bans whose excavations into newly opened archives put her in jeopardy physically and metaphysically from page one. The suspenseful plotting and forward-driving style made the book almost impossible for me to put down. Bloxam captures seemingly small moments between characters and mines their psychological depths in a few deft strokes. She's an absolute master of the simile! She uses it like a staple gun. If you love language and the art and craft of fiction, this is a must-read. Joan meets her match in archivist Cosimo Chiesa. Not only the two damaged central characters but the whole community around them, we learn, has taken or will be forced to take sides in "night battles" where truths about ourselves engage in an endlessly cyclical conflict with mortal consequences.

5.0 out of 5 stars A well crafted unforgettable novel, April 16, 2009

By 

A. Mercier (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Night Battles (Hardcover)

M.F. Bloxam uses superb skill in crafting a truly unforgettable novel. Her vivid descriptions leap out of the page to bring landscape of Sicily alive. Her characters are filled with the well-formed mix of virtue and flaws as to make them seem real. Her narrative style creatively builds an aura of suspense that leads the reader through a breathtaking journey into a supernatural realm that seems both haunting and plausible. I found it difficult to put down once I started reading it and I look forward to her second effort.