The Massacre at San Pietro di Montechiaro (I)

What follows is the opening chapter of Ecks Ridgehead's new book (as yet untitled, and very much a work in progress) - any and all comments would be greatly appreciated. Specifically - does it make the reader want to continue reading?

The Massacre at San Pietro di Montechiaro (I)

It wasn’t until a long time after the dust had settled and the blood had dried dark on the ground that the journalists came to the monastery at San Pietro di Montechiaro. The first ones that trickled in came from the local newspapers, but then, as the story grew in notoriety and spread like the blood that seeped into the coarse monastic robes, reporters began to arrive from Naples, Rome, Florence and Milan.

They peered into the church and whistled and shook their heads in disbelief as they took in the scene of blood-soaked stones and twisted, broken bodies. They dubbed it the “San Pietro Massacre”, which I suppose was true enough, but when they came to write their stories the truth became a rather more elusive bird. Armed with every reporter’s love of the sensational and only the most meagre of undeniable facts, their pens raced across their notebooks.

“Escaped madman driven wild by full moon,” wrote one. “Misguided assassination attempt tears peaceful monastery to pieces,” wrote another. “Secretive extremist death cult with intense hatred of Catholicism,” wrote yet another. One reporter even went so far as to insist that the monks were loathsome sodomites and that the Angel of Death had descended upon them as punishment.

No matter how they wracked their brains and squeezed out the last drops from their imaginations, though, none of them got the account of events exactly right. As their cameras flashed and popped and they scrawled hyperbole into their notebooks, some of them got a little of it right and some got a little more of it right. But most of them got it nearly all wrong.

I know exactly how it happened, though. Because I was there.

[Edited: with thanks to JD Riso for her suggestions]

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