Shanti: The Sadist Heaven

"Alessandro Manzetti's NARAKA is a dark, frightening and heartbreaking novel that takes an unflinching look at evil and courage. Highly recommended!"
--Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of GLIMPSE and V-WARS

"I am unable to think of a more original novel in any genre. I've never taken LSD and now I don't have to; after finishing NARAKA, its hideous, chimeral imagery raced ceaseless Tartarean circles in my brain, like a spew of appalling living things, and I was helpless to stop it. This book is a must-read for fans of any type of heavy-weight non-mainstream fiction, an unparalleled literary carpet-bombing that will warp your mind for some time to come."
--Edward Lee, author of THE BIGHEAD and WHITE TRASH GOTHIC

"A frenzied explosion of controlled lunacy unlike anything else you'll read this year ... or next."
--David J. Schow, author of THE SHAFT

"A gut punch of a novel that brings to mind-and then exceeds-the hellscapes of Dante and Bosch, read NARAKA at your own risk: its images will infiltrate your being and take root in your mind."
-Lucy Taylor, author of THE SAFETY OF UNKNOWN CITIES

"A stark, brutal vision of a future shrouded in darkness and steeped in blood. This is sharp-edged science fiction that claws deeper into your brain with every word you read."
--Tim Waggoner, author of THE MOUTH OF THE DARK

"Many works deal with the darker sides of existence and what it means to be alive, to be human, or something other than human--anything but human--but I have honestly never read anything that does it quite the way Manzetti does it in NARAKA. Raw and deeply disturbing, I can guarantee you NARAKA is unlike anything you've experienced before. Not to be missed"
-Greg F. Gifune, author of SAVAGE and A WINTER SLEEP

"This is a wild ride through a new kind of hell. Visceral. Reminiscent of Clive Barker"
--Michael Bailey, Bram Stoker Award Winning Author

China Miéville’s epic world building meets Charlee Jacob’s beautifully brutal prose. Shanti is a horrifying look into the post-apocalyptic Earth and just what humans will do to each just to survive.

The orphan sisters, Justine and Juliette, are entrusted to the care of the Sainte Marie College headed by Madame Desroches, a transgender matron of the infamous and dystopian neighborhood Paris South 5, the Hyper-Bronx of the French capital. The two sisters will become prey and predators of a brutal and hopeless world, where everybody wants to become a citizen of the mythical Shanti, the Holy City. Shanti is an artificial paradise, the last chance of a decent living following the apocalypse due to the radioactive meteor Uxor77. Now the Earth is characterized only by the annihilation of animal protein, the spread of cannibalism and brutal sexual deviances.

The destinies of the two girls take shape in an apocalyptic Paris, with its red-light districts and the fashionable restaurants of human flesh, and then in the desert, among the subhuman menageries of the barren, desperate Mesoamerican Republic.

Flamingo is a wicked creature that has survived the time to become the queen of Shanti, the Eldorado of Sex, whose heretic and sadist court, pulls the strings of everybody’s fate. But the New France’s criminal underworld as well as a powerful and cruel organization that control technology, the world markets of new synthetic drugs and the clandestine trade in human flesh, want to get their hands on the Holy City.

Justine and Juliette become involved in different games of power; one will become predator, the other prey, always looking for faith, in spite of everything. What fate awaits them? Shanti is written as an homage to the famed sisters of the Marquis de Sade’s infamous novel Justine, as a futurization of that famous, heretic masterpiece.