Many a child has burrowed under the covers at night with a flashlight and a pile of books. Be they comics or ghost stories or bloody tales of high-seas adventure, they’re a tried-and-true escape-route from the more mundane horrors of growing up. In contrast to a life full of uncomprehending adults and sadistic peers, the company of Long John Silver and Cthulhu are like warm hugs.

But what happens when those old, imaginary loves refuse to let us go? When, deep into adulthood, we begin to suspect that we might never have made it out from those blankets? That our lives as grown-ups might be, themselves, the dream, while our flashlights have long since gone dark?

Such are the stakes in the hilarious universe of Michele Mari, one of Italy’s most beloved authors. On the cusp between autobiography and fiction, at the crossroads of memory and myth, these are stories that find Mari’s overbearing father revealing that he’s been stealing back and hiding away every toy or book his son has ever lost … Where Mari’s favorite boyhood authors engage in a literary deathmatch within his mind to decide which one will be allowed to remain … Where a remembered playground and its attendant tortures becomes as remote and forbidding a territory as Patagonia or Mars.

Hailed as category-defying cult classics in Italy since their publication, the stories collected in this volume here make their first appearance in English, and are the perfect introduction to a writer in a league with Kafka and Poe–if only they’d collected sci-fi paperbacks and dreamed of becoming pirates.