Catastrophe by Mr Dino Buzzati is an antidote to the optimism of the season.

Pessimism is not trending. Even though we seem to be living in a period full of deeply worrisome events where would we have every right to be pessimistic, the narratives that we are drawn to – Marvel superhero movies, TV talent contests, heart-warming photo slideshows on Facebook – tend to look on the bright side of things, to evoke warm feelings with a temporary experience of hope and stability. How many times have we watched the world hurtle towards destruction, only for it to be saved at the last minute by the efforts of an individual? How many times will we do it again?

The ubiquity of such narratives is perhaps why, in 2018, it’s a pleasure to rediscover the work of Italian author Mr Dino Buzzati. A journalist and novelist, best known for his 1940 book The Tartar Steppe, Mr Buzzati did not have what you might call a rosy outlook on the universe. Quite the opposite, in fact. At least that seems to be the case judging by Catastrophe, a collection of his short stories from the mid-1960s that is being published for the first time in the US this month, allowing a wider audience to appreciate this lesser-known (but attention-worthy) author.

True to its name, Catastrophe, issued as part of Ecco’s Art Of The Story series, draws the reader into a sequence of nightmarish scenarios in which things – buildings, ideals, social conventions – seem to be falling apart. In “The Scala Scare”, a group of musos are trapped in the Scala opera house in Milan while they wait for a military coup to unfold outside. In “And Yet They Are Knocking At Your Door”, a matriarch stubbornly sits in her family home, trying to ignore the flood that is washing it away. Like Mr Franz Kafka before him, Mr Buzzati explores the paranoiac experiences of individuals battling against institutions, most notably in “Seven Floors”, a story about a man who, through administrative errors, gets continually moved closer to the death ward in a surreal, tiered hospital. But Mr Buzzati also has a penchant for depicting the strange horrors that exist just a few steps beyond normality. In one story, a woman finds a hideous monster lurking in her attic. In another, a tourist couple are gibbeted for making a minor faux pas in a rural village.

This may all sound a little gloomy but, thanks to Mr Buzatti’s prose, which sprints along with journalistic precision and clarity, there’s a healthy amount of sardonic wit in these stories to counteract the horror. “His humour is very dark, but it’s not pitiless,” says the novelist Mr Kevin Brockmeier, who has contributed a preface for this edition. “I think that Buzzati did, in fact, value human beings,” he says. “He exposed his characters to the horrors, the catastrophes… not out of callousness, but because he himself shared in those horrors and catastrophes, and felt that we all did. In other words, his prose is often clinical, but his perspective is not.”

While researching Mr Buzzati, Mr Brockmeier discovered that the author felt he was doomed to die of pancreatic cancer, the same disease that took his father when he was 14 years old. This prediction, rather spookily, came true. According Mr Brockmeier, it may partly explain the world view that gave birth to Catastrophe. “He was, at heart, a fatalist,” says Mr Brockmeier. “My sense of him is that he believed we bring our fears into being.”

Though Mr Buzzatti was never much associated with a particular movement, Mr Brockmeier associates him with some of the great mid- to late 20th-century Italian fantasists, including Messrs Italo Calvino, Tommaso Landolfi, Luigi Malerba, Giorgio Manganelli and Gesualdo Bufalino. For fans of the above, or anyone looking for a jolt of sublime nastiness this spring, Catastrophe comes thoroughly recommended.

Catastrophe And Other Stories (Ecco) by Mr Dino Buzzati is out now