Miha Mazzini's THE COLLECTOR OF NAMES (Tr Maja Visenjak-Limon)

After what I saw in the cellar I often thought about God. For some time, that was all I thought about. This is how it is, I think. The only time we’re in contact with him is when we sleep. And dreams are our defences, our earthiness, trying to lead us away from Him. If we fight them and break through them we come into contact with Him. That’s what we call a nightmare. The more horrible the nightmare, the closer to Him we are. And that’s why in our everyday life it doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not: but when your life starts becoming a nightmare that belief is the only thing that can save you. There are no decisions when you’re in contact with God. There’s no free will. And that’s what makes the nightmare so horrible. Things happen to you. Horror is the prayer of our time.

What could be more idyllic than a few months' stay on a relatively unpopulated and undiscovered Mediterranean island in the summer between your school years and the start of your adult life? Plenty if you're a teenaged character in Miha Mazzini's cosmic chiller, The Collector of Names, which explores the experiences of a passel of teen boys who've been given the keys to a newly-acquired but still pretty much abandoned villa on one end of the island, and a girl who's come to have her first taste of independence while staying with her great uncle on the other end, where a quaint village braces for the influx of tourists that are about to start pouring in now that a campsite has been established in the island's interior and word has gotten out about it.

Ana's great uncle, Aco, grew up on the island and was the first to encounter its weird and terrifying secret, which manifested in his childhood only as a weird green glow coming from the cellar of the villa when it was newly built and the home of a diplomat's subcontinental Indian widow. Aco took a dare to go check it out as part of his initiation into a gang of older boys who were themselves too afraid of, in particular, the hue of green that shined out of the basement window. He emerged from his encounter with his hair turned completely white, but we don't get to find out what he saw until much later. 

Cut to decades later when Ana has come to visit, and four teenaged boys re-open the villa with the weird secret in its cellar: Max, the son of the villa's new owner and a self-imagined lady-killer and the first to strike up a conversation with Ana on the ferry to the island; strong and fit Sano; less assured farm kid Alfonz; and poor, skinny, clumsy Raf, who is really only along because Max felt he owed Raf a good time after copying off his schoolwork for years and years. They've come for a little while to get good and drunk, having brought rucksacks full of homemade schnapps and cleaned out the entire beer and brandy stock of the village's only store-cum-bar, but since the villa has no refrigerator and the ocean tides on the nearby beach are too strong to use seawater as a cooler, the boys decide to use the spooky cellar to keep their drinks cold -- only to discover a weird crate full of a plastic-like substance that is warm to the touch, and a bunch of tiny stalagtites of what turn out to be some kind of amber, each one containing the letters spelling out somebody's name. All kinds of names, from the commonplace to the exotic and foreign. And there are a LOT.

By the time one of the boys has a direct encounter with the... entity in the cellar, it's too late. 

Some truly gruesome scenes ensue, and some truly touching ones as well. The monster from the cellar affects everyone differently with its simple tactics, but as its victims meet or approach their ends, their unique emotional wounds are reopened as we experience their madness from the inside. The Collector of Names could have just been an entertaining gore-fest, but Mazzini isn't interested in writing a literary slasher film; he wants us to feel what everybody's feeling rather than just pointing and laughing at their deaths.

Livening things up still further is Aco's childhood gang, all of whom grew up to serve in the same military unit, with Aco emerging as the leader with the moral authority he gained when his hair went prematurely white. They have maintained a certain military discipline together over the years, for all that it looks like, to the teenagers arriving on the island, they just sit together on a bench every day and codge (that's what a codger does, right? Codges? Anyway, these guys codge). In other words, under Aco's direction, they've been planning for the day when whatever is in that cellar emerges. Were their preparations effective? Only one way to find out, friends. It's a tight, short read. Go and get it!