Luca Crudi

My name is Luca Crudi. I was born in Rivoli in 1982 and grew up in the Susa Valley. For almost ten years I worked as a surveyor, measuring spaces and drawing lines. Then I moved to Turin, where I opened a craft business in San Salvario with the woman who would become my wife, in one of the city’s most eclectic neighbourhoods. There I met artists of every kind, each with an obsession of their own.

Before I wrote, I read.

I came to books at fourteen or fifteen through gamebooks: stories in which the reader chooses, makes mistakes, goes back and starts again. From there, Tolkien was only a short step away — fantasy as a territory to cross, maps, journeys, the pleasure of a world that continues to exist even after you close the book.

Lovecraft came much later, when I was about twenty-two, and not through a bookshop: through a gaming table. Only afterwards did I seek out the texts, the Necronomicon and the other collections of the myths. It overturned everything: no longer a world to explore, but a world that has no concern for you and will outlive you. Then came the World of Darkness, and with it the decisive lesson — horror is not out there; it is in the one who looks. From that moment on, I sought the horror that needs no monsters: the kind hidden inside irreproachable people, orderly families and small towns.

Then I began building worlds.

I have sat on the other side of the table as a game master since 2003, and as a Keeper since 2016. That is where I truly learned to tell stories: a story is not merely written; it is lived and transformed by those who pass through it. I learned to prepare far more than would ever be seen, to leave room for other people’s decisions, and to accept that a scene might not unfold as I had imagined. And I learned one thing, but it applies to everything else: the strongest moment is not the revelation of the monster; it is when the player realises they have become it.

La linea bianca.

La linea bianca began as a universe of campaigns. For years I wrote down everything that happened at the table: events, places, characters, a line that kept returning. In 2017 I decided to shape the material into a project. In 2022 I realised that I did not have one novel, but enough for a saga. In 2026 I managed to bring order to the chaos and publish the first book (Youcanprint, ISBN 979-12-24079-67-5). In the final version, very little from those games remains recognisable: everything was thoroughly reworked and transformed into fiction.

I do not want the reader to recognise the monster: I want them to realise they have been rooting for it. The white knight and the darkest horror are not two figures; they are the same figure seen from two different points — and the book is the journey from one point to the other.

I am obsessed with the cycle, with the familiar returning corrupted, and with the instant when someone who believed they were acting for good discovers that they are the monster.

I live in Turin: an ordinary city, with its occult version.