Writing as a way of reading the world.
Across social fiction, dystopian imagination, and short-form literary writing, these books explore alienation, technology, moral confusion, and the fragile search for meaning in contemporary life.
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Three works that trace different narrative directions: digital alienation, dystopian resistance, and short-form social conscience.
The novel takes place in what the author calls the first century after the Internet. The protagonist, Luca, is a thirty-something research analyst whose life has grown monotonous and emotionally hollow.
Dissatisfied with his superficial job, disconnected relationships, and an increasingly image-driven society, he slips into the world of online chatrooms through his friend Tonino. What begins as a distraction turns into an existential plunge into virtual connections and digital illusions, blurring the boundaries between real and virtual life.
Through comical and melancholic encounters alike, Luca’s life becomes intertwined with avatars, anonymous friendships, and fleeting cyber-romances. Peluso merges satire and psychology to critique the society of appearance and the emotional numbness of hyperconnectivity, using the title itself as a gentle metaphor for intimacy lost in technological mediation.
A later updated version, Relazione complicata: Che verso hanno le tazzine da caffè? 2.0 (2013), returned to the same theme and expanded the reflection on digital relationships and social disillusionment.
Set in a bleak future version of Italy, especially its southern regions, the story follows Jenny and Mario, two sixteen-year-olds who leave the Underground, a network of subterranean shelters where people have retreated to escape the surface world.
Above them lies a vast toxic wasteland ruled by an elite group known only as “Them,” made uninhabitable by radiation, pollution, and warfare. As they move through the ashes of civilization, they encounter death squads, superstitious tribes, and “monkey children” surviving among garbage heaps.
Amid devastation, the protagonists discover a secret resistance movement fighting back against oppression. The novel revives the Monaciello, a mischievous Neapolitan folk spirit, transforming legend into a symbol of hope and rebellion.
Through speculative fiction, Marcello builds a political and ecological allegory where environmental disaster merges with dictatorship and cultural amnesia, producing a dark coming-of-age odyssey shaped by science fiction, social critique, and Neapolitan myth.
Rac-Corti: mini storie per chi va di fretta, edited by Andrea Careri and published in Rome in 2008, is a literary collection devoted to the art of the very short story: compact narrative moments distilled into just a few pages.
The series brings together micro-stories by emerging and independent Italian authors. Its title plays on the Italian words racconti and corti, emphasizing brevity, immediacy, and literary experimentation for readers “in a hurry.”
Marcello Peluso’s contribution, Non capisco (“I Don’t Understand”), is a brief yet powerful narrative dedicated to the innocent victims of the Camorra. Later released as a standalone eBook, it unfolds as the monologue of a young boy from the outskirts of Naples trying to make sense of life, injustice, and death in a region overshadowed by organized crime.
The refrain “non capisco” becomes a language of impotence and disillusionment. The Camorra is not represented through spectacle, but through its psychological and social aftermath: how it infiltrates ordinary life, corrodes trust, and weakens hope itself.
Whether the setting is a chatroom, a poisoned future, or the outskirts of Naples, these texts share the same impulse: to listen to what people become when systems fail them, isolate them, seduce them, or silence them.
Writing here is not escape. It is a way of observing fracture, irony, disorientation, resistance, and the stubborn persistence of human conscience.