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Sex Is My Bitch

I'm Not Scared
by Niccolò Ammaniti
translated by Jonathan Hunt
144pp, Canongate, £12
It is the heatwave summer of 1978, still remembered in Italy for its ferocity and duration. While the dozen adults in Aqua Traverse - a cluster of houses lost somewhere in the south of the peninsula - spend most of the day prostrate indoors, the children set off on their bikes to explore the countryside, tell scary stories and set each other dares. As the narrator Michele puts it: "We could do whatever we liked. No cars ever went by. There were no dangers. And the grown-ups stayed shut up indoors, like toads waiting for the heat to die down." To spare the fat girl who tags along a humiliating forfeit, nine-year-old Michele volunteers to explore an abandoned farmhouse in a remote location at the very edge of the gang's territory. There he makes a mysterious and terrifying discovery that he instinctively decides to keep to himself. He later tries to tell his father, but he doesn't want to know. Indeed, the adults in this isolated community all seem to be unusually preoccupied and tense.
Then, without any explanation, a sinister and powerful stranger comes to stay, ousting Michele's younger sister from her bed in the upstairs corridor where the children sleep. The long, stuffy nights are punctuated by loud quarrels among the grown-ups downstairs. Before long, the reader has unravelled the meaning of Michele's discovery, but he himself never does, although he must and does take full responsibility for it.
Thus baldly summarised, I'm Not Scared might serve as the storyline for almost anything from a Famous Five -style children's book to a Stephen King cheap and nasty. Comparisons have indeed been made, but preprinted labels won't stick to a writer of Niccolò Ammaniti's quality. This is one of those books where, after a couple of paragraphs you know that you're in safe hands, and after a couple of pages you're lost. Don't start it on the way home from work unless the train...