Book Review: Diavola by Jennifer Thorne
Genre: Gothic Horror/Drama
Age: Adult
Format: Audiobook
The audiobook was included in Everand with my subscription. This was a fairly quick listen and kept me riveted down to the final minute.
This novel features the dysfunctional Pace family, vacationing in Monteperso, Italy, and staying at its local haunt, the Villa Taccola. There’s a forbidden section of the villa (the tower), and the locals warn them not to open, but as is the tradition in horror stories, the characters are too curious, and unleash the spirit of La Dama Bianca, a Florentine woman who lived in the villa during the Renaissance and dyed her hair yellow. The story starts in the picturesque Tuscan village and switches to New York City in the second half, and it threads a cool balance between toxic family dynamics and a straight-up haunted house.
If you think your Thanksgiving dinners are awkward, try being a fly on the wall when the Pace family shares space. First, a few introductions. The mom and dad have very little to offer. The dad exists simply to remind everyone that he paid for this trip and if they need to endure a few weird nights, so be it—now quiet down so he can get back to reading his paperbacks.
Their eldest daughter Nicole is Type-A and high-strung, riddled with jealousy toward her younger sister, Anna. Nicole is married with 2 daughters, and though the story tried really hard to make her husband and children matter, they felt very generic. Then comes Benny, the brother and Anna’s twin, who’d rather be Anna’s shadow than a person with a spine. So strong is his codependence that his new boyfriend, Christopher, blames Anna for bossing Benny and uses every trick in the book to make her feel small and worthless. The author channels such specific microaggressions into the guy that he becomes the ultimate “guy with a punchable face.”
Anna is easily the best one to watch this madness unfold. Nobody in her family really likes her, and the only reason they tolerate her company on this trip is so they can use her beginner-level Italian-speaking skills and skimp on hiring a local tour guide. What’s interesting is how Nicole and Benny, in particular, project a lot of their own traumas and insecurities onto Anna, blaming her as the bad luck that befell their otherwise picture-perfect lives. It’s such a relatable toxicity, and it amazed me each time someone twisted an event in the past or the present to paint Anna as the bad one. So, it’s only fitting that La Dama Bianca makes Anna the object of her haunting.
In many ways, I found the family drama much more interesting than the real horror of La Dama Bianca. There were some creepy passages, but more than the lingering shadows and slamming doors and nightmarish dreams in Italy, the sequences in New York City were much more terrifying. La Dama Bianca consumes what’s left of Anna’s life, slowly stripping her of everything that matters to her. The book goes to a really dark corner and made me care about Anna’s downward spiral. At that point, the true horror became less about the spirit and more about Anna’s loneliness, her slipping grip on sanity, her crumbling social life, her interpersonal bridges that burn one by one. Horrors that can happen to any of us.
As is expected of gothic horror, the two motifs of family and horror take turns under the narrative spotlight but never overshadow the other. As a result, we have a delicious blend of seduction and possession, love and hate, warm company and abject isolation. It’s like watching a head-on collision in slow motion that you cannot—dare not—look away from.
Purchase Link—Everand (included with subscription)
Review by Aditya Sundararajan
Twitter & Bluesky: @AdityaSWrites
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