The Twenty Days of Turin — Giorgio De Maria’s brilliant and eerily prescient 1977 horror novel, available in a new, vivid translation from Ramon Glazov — has a chipper vein of humor running erratically through its miasma of black dread. The effusions of “the stranger,” a batty anonymous letter writer who sends long, plaintive communiqués to the novel’s unnamed narrator, perfectly express this disturbing tone of dark comedy.

In one letter, the stranger describes his apartment building as a tall cylindrical tower with a demolished stairwell that necessitates he climb the walls to reach his living quarters.

But the physical exertion isn’t the part that bothers him: