Anna, 34, is tired of her family’s constant criticism and blame. During their annual vacation at a Tuscan villa, strange accidents make her suspect a supernatural force is at play. As tensions with her family rise, Anna begins to question whether something is wrong with her or if the haunting is bringing out something darker within her.

The novel is a compelling psychological drama rather than a traditional gothic horror. The real tension comes from Anna's relationship with her toxic family, particularly her insufferable siblings. Thorne does a fantastic job of portraying their entitlement and dysfunction, and the setting of clueless American tourists in Italy adds a fun twist.

Fans of psychological drama, occult themes, and dysfunctional families will enjoy this book, though the supernatural elements take a backseat to the family dynamics.

Thank you netgalley for the audiobook!

my attention strayed a little listening but i still found this book to be plenty entertaining and plenty creepy!

I enjoy a good haunted house story in theory but i’ve realized a lot of the ones i read lately have been lacking something for me. this one kinda mostly that itch I needed. the Italian setting of the story was unique and well done (although some of the atmosphere felt a bit overexplained) which made it a little different. the way Thorne slowly reveals the bits of Anna’s past and why she’s regarded as the outcast of the family kept me interested and the horror was well done too although I wanted a bit more from the ending.

This book was something I wasn't expecting at all. Its a dark story that I didn't want to stop listening to. This book has a Gothic setting and such vivid descriptions that make everything come to life, drawing you into the story even more. The writing starts off slow, but its just getting you into the setting and characters, then it hits you with you bag and you have to think about what you just read. The story starts evolving in surprising ways and you have to take a second to think about what you just read or in my case listened to.

The main character also goes on a journey of self discover in the book that makes you question her choices time to time and makes her unreliable or reliable, its hard to tell. I do wish we would have learned a little bit more about some of the supporting characters in the book to give them a little more context, but thats just me being nosy, I think the amount that the author gives is just right to get the story though. Nonetheless, the themes of betrayal, love, and redemption are woven beautifully into the story, creating an emotional depth that resonates.

Thorne has created an engaging, eerie tale that any fan of Gothic fiction will enjoy. Definitely worth the read!

This was one of my expected releases for 2024, but I guess it didn't live up to my expectations. The story had a too slow of a pace for me, I felt myself losing interest in the plot a lot. I can see how Diavola might appeal to a lot of readers, sadly it just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for making this audiobook available. This was a slow start of a story. I found that I would completely lose interest in the story.

This book takes a traditional concept, a haunted house, and pairs with a vacation where the flaws of the family further enhance the haunting that they find themselves trapped in. Further more, the narrator quickly becomes unreliable both in how she witnesses the haunting, and how her family views her, leaving the reader wondering if it is she or her family who is the problem.

a good book for anyone looking to have a creepy and scary time. it made me afraid in my own house lol.

I absolutely love this! It was spooky, and poignant, and pretty funny at times all while not trying too hard. Our heroine is messy, weird, and relatable. Strong vibes too!

Slow burn horror is not my favorite type of horror book, but this one surprised me. It was very well written and I think the pay off was worth the read. Give it a shot.

I appreciated the unlikable characters, the unstable prestigious creative artist persona of Anna, and the disturbed haunting by La Dama Bianca. There are undeniable similarity between Anna and the lady who seems to be attached herself to Anna. The writing is deliciously poetic and gothic. I'm a little obsessed with Anna myself and her unpredictable nature. There are times when I was rolling my eyes in frustration on how obsessively her family members are clinging to their absolute basic nature. Deranged, spooky, and entertaining read.

I loved this! It fell exactly in my wheelhouse and did what so few ghost-horror type stories manage to do for me, which is balance the internal, personal conflict with ethe external creepy conflict. Thorne managed to write a story that tapped into well used tropes and yet still was genuinely creepy - and I do not scare easily.

This does take a little while to get into and at first, you're going to be wondering why the hell Anna puts up with her highly toxic family who are some of the worst collection of narcissists and selfish arseholes imaginable. Generally when a MC is always on the outside or always treated badly, you start to feel they have a victim complex or that they are an unreliable narrator. Thorne does a creditable job of making you pause and say 'oh, no actually her family really are a bunch of shitheads.' All of which fits perfectly with the family holiday gone wrong, the very ghostly selfish arsehole who joins the party and Anna final destination.

I really loved this book. I can't wait to read it again. Am now on the look out for every other spooky book the author has written.

i've read Lute by Jennifer Thorne prior to Diavola and have seen other reviews so i went into this story with my expectations set a little lower than the cover alone would suggest.

Diavola is what i like to call quiet horror, where there are a lot of unsettling and eerie moments that get under your skin but aren't the main attraction. the family DRAMA was truly awful in this most entertaining way, i have related to many of these characters with family members i know. i think the ending is where this story will either be a hit or fall flat for some. i personally enjoyed the decent into madness but understand where people may want more action and in your face horror elements. as a gal who took a year of italian in college i enjoyed this vacation gone wrong story set in italy, although the duolingo shout out was a tad much, i really liked seeing italy in this gothic tone with humor and blood red wine.

overall i recommend this to anyone, especially people getting into horror or enjoy the eerie slow moments that have social commentary on family drama and the pressures families can put on each other plus piss blonde hair (and so much more!) i had a lot of fun with this and i thought the audiobook narration was also well done!

definitely a slow burn. This one felt like it was building a lot of tension but I felt that tension abate when the setting left Italy. I wished we had stayed there for the duration

I didnt think , I needed a vacation horror but I absolutely loved this absurd and terrifying story .
Thank you for the audiobook arc .

I loved this novel. It was a great mix of annoying family story and haunted house horror tied together by a narrator who, while I still can't decide if she was reliable or not, was easy to sympathies with.

Thorne has done a great job adding something new to the classic haunted house. It starts as a foreign, old-world ghost, encountered on an unpleasant family vacation, but then becomes a malevolent lingering spirit.

Between the tension of the Pace family's disfunction and the horror of the ghostly encounter, Diavola was an intense page turner which I would absolutely recommend to haunted house fans.

Family vacations are hard already, but throw in some narcissistic parents, enabling siblings and a reputation of being the family black sheep and you got a recipe for disaster. Enter the Pace family. But wait, there's more!😂 Stir in an ancient Italian villa with its own family secrets and things start to go pretty off the rails. Who can you trust? What is real? Is your twin brother really bringing that old shit up right now? While this other crazy shit is afoot?!? 🙄 Families!?! Amiright?

💃💃💃

DIAVOLA by @jennmariethorne is something in between a slow-burn and fast-paced. This story sort of gnaws at you bit by bit, giving you just enough to be annoyingly curious about what will happen next. I found myself compelled to scratch that itch and turn the pages. It is easy to get lost in the petty squabbles of the Pace family Italian vacation from old wounds to long-held secrets, but there is real drama lurking in the shadows.

I could not stand almost any one of these characters in the Pace family beyond the MC which surprises me as that is often a deal breaker for me. The Pace family are insecure, vapid and petty with little to no self-awareness or personal responsibility. But the way this one is crafted, the Pace family's intensifying Emotional Manipulation Olympics is the train wreck you can't stop watching as the distraction to the main event. The word unsettling captures my reading experience pretty accurately and I did physically squirm at one point. 🪱 I found the narration of the audio was a good complement to the story itself.

This one is out on the shelves now!! Thank you to the author, @netgalley and the publisher @tornightfire and @macmillan.audio for the e/audio-ARCs as well as the finished copy.

Read this one if you:
🙄Can't look away from absurd family drama
🇮🇹Are going on a vacation to Italy soon and want to know where not to stay
👊Want to feel like punching a guy named Christopher in the face
🕯️Are down with a good haunt

Diavola
Written by Jennifer Marie Thorne
Read by Andi Arndt
Book 74/250
Genre: Horror
Format: Digital/Audio, ARC
Pages/Time: 296/ 10hr 11min
Published: March 26, 2024
Rating: 9.5/10
Narration: 9/10
Horror: 👻👻👻👻

“There was something careful about the energy here. Not calm, exactly. More … preserved in amber.”

Hands down one of the best “haunted house” books I have ever read! Thorne takes this horror staple and infuses it with originality and personality by centering it around one of the most terrifying prospects, an uncomfortable family vacation. From start to finish, I loved this book and am adding a new title to what I am now referring to as the Horror Renaissance.

A good haunting is only as good as the POV character(s), and this is where I think Thorne’s writing really shines. I feel like I’ve met the Pace family. They love each other but often can’t stand each other, and after a week together they are constantly bickering. This makes it even more disturbing when Thorne starts turning the screws in this picturesque Italian villa. Diavola is a brilliant take on the haunting sub-genre and already a top contender for best horror of 2024!

I would definitely recommend Diavola as a summer read. Well, maybe not for a family holiday.
The novel balances light hearted elements and even funny elements with more serious and dark themes. It does it quite well too, keeping the tension high but not unpleasant. Some moments were absolutely heartbreaking, but the overall impression is not daunting.
There is definitely a moment towards the third part of the book where it looses some of its momentum, and becomes much darker, which I did not expect or appreciate. It all comes together by the end though, and is absolutely worth making it through.

dnf

Having really liked another novel by Thorne I wanted to like this one too...but I just can't look past the author's bland horror and her depiction of Italy...

Approximately 20% in, and the horror elements feel like tired clichés, served without any pizzazz. Yet, the novel seems to operate under the belief that it is self-aware, even 'smart,' in its usage of tropes. Take, for instance, a scene where Anna, our mc, sees a figure inside the house and knows she's not 'seeing things' because “she understood angles, perspective. This shape was inside the house.” We also get creepy children, and Anna realizes only later that said children are not her nieces because they are speaking in Italian...all of this happens way too early on. Thorne is spoon-feeding us the horror instead of letting it simmer. While I understand that haunted houses/places have been thoroughly explored in the horror genre, Thorne fails to build suspense, relying instead on a series of very 101 horror elements/scenes. Sometimes, making your characters aware of a place’s wrongness from the get-go can work, but Thorne is no Jackson and lacks the skill to pull this off (in the first pages, we get a trite horror line: “<i>Someone’s in here</i>, Anna thought. <i>Listening</i>.”).

And the characters, oh, where do I begin? This type of obnoxious rich American family is everywhere in the media, and despite the promises of satirical depth, Thorne's take on the wealthy is as shallow as a puddle. The so-called "black sheep" protagonist, supposedly 'real' and unlike the rest of her shallow family, is banal, devoid of any real substance. Certainly, she does not make for a convincing problem child nor is she as interesting/relatable a figure as the narrative wants us to believe.

My biggest issue lies with the author's portrayal of Italy and her usage of the Italian language. It's baffling how little effort was put into researching or consulting actual Italians (yes, ideally more than one) for authenticity. What is it with American authors doing the bare minimum research when setting books abroad? At least consult a few people from the country/culture you are intent on representing your book in before you start writing nonsense or just piling on the stereotypes...

→ Thorne, I don't know who told you that "molto bene" is used in the way you think it's used, but they did you wrong (“She hit the galleries on Friday. L’Accademia. The Uffizi.<i> Molto bene</i>. Overwhelming in the best way.”...?)

→ The protagonist tells us that her Italian 'accent' is good (“Her actual facility with Italian wasn’t nearly as good as her accent.”) when surely it should be pronunciation?

→ A few pages in and we already have stereotypes such as Italians being bad drivers, and Italian men being don juans (leering at women/making inappropriate advances)

→ The description of the villa tries hard to convey an understanding of architecture and interior design but it comes across as name-dropping (“alfresco dining”...). Sure, the narrative tries to be sort of self-aware, as the villa is described as “[M]ore Epcot Italy than the real thing”, but it ultimately fails to pull this off as it immediately flexes its art history knowledge: “And yet there was something idiosyncratic about Villa Taccola. The whole house suggested pentimenti,”. And I failed to be amused by a bathroom being described as “you know, a bathroom—” (why bother including this? is this a house tour? 75 questions with vogue?). Thorne's grasp of Italian art and architecture consists of an overuse of the term "Romanesque".

→ And let's not forget the baffling detail of Anna serving herself a "cold prosecco" – because apparently, warm and/or room temperature prosecco is a common occurrence for this moneyed woman who claims to be an enthusiast of Italian culture.

→ Anna's Italian is so good supposedly that when she goes for a drink in a restaurant, she is given an Italian menu (her companions are given English menus)...I do not believe that for a second. Saying a few words in Italian won't magically make Italians give you an Italian menu. I don't get given Italian menus. The waitress somehow compliments her on her translation skills (“Anna translated for the others as best she could, rewarded with a “<i>molto bene</i>” and a wink from the waitress, ”)...but how would she know whether Anna's translation was good or not if she spoke little/no English? And if she did speak English she would not be talking in Italian to Anna, despite the latter (claiming) to know enough Italian to get by.

→ We have a scene of Anna, her brother, Benny, and his bf going into ‘Monteperso’ and passing a tabaccheria/BAR with “four sour-faced Italian men of indeterminate age leaning on the building and smoking cigarettes, seemingly in silence. They all turned to stare at the car as it approached, unsmiling. Benny gave a neighborly wave. They didn’t react. Not even to shift weight.”; 1st of all, if there are no tables outside, would they really be standing outside a tabaccheria to smoke? They would go to a bar with tables outside or a bench or whatever. Also, they would definitely be talking to each other. 2ndly, they wouldn’t be so blank-faced. if anything, if it's an area with little tourism, the locals would look puzzled by the sight of tourists/non-locals; the only instances where they would look more antagonistic is if the tourists in question were to be POC (but Anna & co are white so...here it makes 0 sense other than going for that 'there be strangers' horror trope); 3rdly…waving? What the fuck do you expect? For these elderly men to wave back? When I worked in Venice, I found waving tourists obnoxious, often they seemed uncaring of their surroundings (pushing people aside or getting too close to others), and excepted what…the locals to entertain them? Is this a zoo? An amusement park? Do the locals 'owe' you anything?

→ And don't even get me started on the overuse of "pentimento". It reminds me of how people (especially dabblers of artspeak) like to misuse/overuse 'chiaroscuro'. I understand that the word pentimento sounds cool to non-Italians, and the whole concept will certainly have an ‘edge’, but goodness me don't use it as a metaphor to describe things that have nothing to do with it. Sure, you can use art terms as metaphors for other things, but here, Thorne does it so much it just comes across as obnoxious, and especially ridiculous to an Italian speaker.