An Italian folklore mystery in which the only way to save the missing girl is to help the woman who made her disappear.
Julia F. CliffordThe Good Walker✦An adult folkloric mystery
Rome · Benandanti folklore · 80,000 words
Serena cannot save her missing cousin without helping the woman who made her disappear.
When Serena Walker moves from Dublin to Rome to study history, she expects lectures and late-night bars, not Gemma’s disappearance during All Saints’ Mass at St John Lateran.
The clues lead to Maddalena, a sixteenth-century Benandante wrongly executed as a witch and trapped between worlds for five centuries. To save Gemma, Serena must accept that she is one of the legendary Friulian “Good Walkers” and find a way to help Maddalena without losing her own soul in the process.
Italian folklore mysteryRome settingBenandantiStandalone with series potential
The real history that inspired Serena Walker’s world.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli, the Benandanti, or “Good Walkers,” described themselves as protectors. They believed their spirits left their sleeping bodies at night to battle forces that threatened their communities, crops, vineyards and livestock.
They did not think of themselves as witches. Yet inquisitors tried to force their beliefs into the familiar shape of the witches’ sabbath, gradually turning a tradition of spiritual defence into evidence of diabolical witchcraft.
The Witches’ Sabbath
The Benandanti insisted that they fought against witches, but inquisitors gradually interpreted their testimony through established ideas about witchcraft and the witches’ Sabbath.
The Witches’ Sabbath, Salvator Rosa, c. 1635–1654, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons.Friuli in 1553
The landscape in which the beliefs of the Benandanti took shape, shown in a map printed in Venice during the sixteenth century.
La vera descrizione del Friuli, Giovanni Andrea Valvassori, Venice, 1553. Public domain. Scan released into the public domain; image via Wikimedia Commons.
That collision between folklore, faith and institutional power became one of the starting points for The Good Walker. The novel draws on the historical accounts while building its own mythology around the thresholds the Good Walkers crossed and the responsibilities they carried.
Each planned mystery draws on the folklore and hidden history of a different Italian place while Serena learns what it truly means to be a Good Walker.
Book I · Work in progress
Rome
Benandanti, a vanished cousin and a spirit waiting five hundred years to cross over.
Book II · Planned
Naples
Easter, a sealed liminal door and a janara-like malandante moving through the city’s shadows.
Book III · Planned
Sardinia
An accabadora asks for Serena’s help, and an old island tradition refuses to remain in the past.
Book IV · Planned
Lucca
A death at Lucca Comics & Games, where cosplay, aliases and old fandom histories hide more than one identity.
Book V · Planned
Monti Sibillini
Serena confronts the Benandanti congregation and the cost of its centuries-old failure to help Maddalena.
Final arc · Planned
Matera
Human and liminal danger converge across Calabria and Basilicata as Serena must decide whether she can keep walking alone.
Follow the journey
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