Luca Crudi

My name is Luca Crudi. For almost ten years I worked as a surveyor, measuring spaces and drawing lines: one of those lines would follow me all the way here. Then, with the woman who would become my wife, I opened a craft business in San Salvario, one of Turin’s most eclectic neighbourhoods. There I met artists of every kind, each with an obsession of their own.

Before I wrote, I read.

I found my way there at twelve or thirteen through gamebooks: stories in which the reader chooses, makes mistakes, goes back and begins 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 from a bookshop: from a gaming table. Only afterwards did I seek out the texts, the Necronomicon and the other collections of the myths. It was a reversal: 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, the narrator in the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, 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. The game master knows the entire world; the players see it one room at a time, and behind every door there is a die to roll. 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, held together by an unpleasant question: what does it take to erase a person from the records? Not to kill them: to erase them. Remove the line, make the total balance. In 2026 I managed to bring order to the chaos and publish the first of five volumes with Youcanprint. Very little from those games remains recognisable: everything has been reworked and transformed into fiction. What remains is the method of the table: no character sees everything; the reader enters every room, one at a time.

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. In my Peruvian valley, bureaucracy does not conceal horror: it administers it.

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.