The Black Opera

Conrad Scalese is an atheist and bel canto opera librettist living in an early 19th-century Naples where sung Masses and operas produce miracles, the ghosts who trouble the living have agendas of their own, and sometimes the dead return to life. In the wake of a disaster that he’s rumored to have caused, Scalese is hired by Ferdinand, the king of the Two Sicilies, to help create an opera that will act as a counterspell to one being devised by the Prince’s Men, a shadowy Rosicrucian-like order that has already used an opera to cause the eruption of Mt. Tambora and the infamous Year Without a Summer. Gentle (Ilario: The Stone Golem) has created a fast-paced, intricate, swashbuckling tale, and Scalese’s adventures in this richly detailed world are as dense with high stakes, grand betrayals, and extravagant characters as the opera he has six weeks to write. (May)