With this collection of short stories, Dario Argento makes his return to the printed page to entice us with new dark fairy tales packed with imagery, in which deftly rendered demons, witches and supernatural beings mingle with ordinary humans. His fantastical brand of horror is always poised to surprise us, hiding behind likenesses which we know can be unmasked at any time. And readers find his stories eminently verisimilar, with their children and young women, scholars, historical figures, warriors, demons and chimerical beings all undergoing unsettling and even terrifying experiences. Countless traces of Argento’s cinematic genius can be found in these stories with their diverse settings in places that are frightening and fantastical yet real at the same time, like the Villa of the Monsters in Sicily, the Uffizi in Florence, an island in Indonesia, or Rome’s Angelica Library.