Squinnel and the Mystery of the Nutlet

By Stefano Vazzola

What do an unnerving, freaked-out squirrel and a gaunt, flea-ridden cat have in common? Scabies? Ticks? The answer is wrapped in the mystery of the animals' wood, where sordid deals and unexpected friendships coexist.

Squinnel and the Mystery of the Nutlet is an oblique noir fable that opens the doors onto a mythical world but immediately slams it in your face to the sound of crude reality and irony. Oh, there’ll be good feelings, too. We can’t really live without them these days, can we?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stefano Vazzola
• Release date: Apr 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224482337

Book preview

Squinnel

and the Mystery

of the

Nutlet

A sordid tale of the furry underworld

This is a work of fiction. Any reference to real events, people or places is fictitious. Other names, characters, places and events are figments of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real facts, places or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The illustrations were created with DALL-E.

1.

He had no idea how, but for the umpteenth time Squinnel found himself without nutlets. And if there was one thing that Squinnel couldn't bear, one thing that really freaked him out, it was getting back to his welcoming house, built with great difficulty in an enormous honker tree at the top of the hill, opening the little fridge fuelled by murderous instincts, and finding nothing there! No nutlet shake, no nutlet tart, no nutlet pie, no nutlet jam to spread on a slice of nutlet bread. It was, of course, true that he had never had any of those foods in his fridge, because he couldn't cook, but he would at least have expected to find a bowl of nutlet pulp for supper that night. He didn't think he'd finished it all at lunch. But maybe he was confused. Recently, in fact, he seemed to be missing a beat every now and then. Three or four days ago he had dozed off in his rocking chair and woken up covered in sweat under a donberry bush several miles away, with a big marrer's knife in his hand and covered in what looked very like blood...

That’s all I needed, he had thought, puzzled and alarmed. I’m a sleepwalker and maybe a murderer, too.

He didn’t know whether the stuff he was smeared with was blood or not. He had no intention of tasting it because, if it really was blood, he didn’t like the idea of putting someone else’s blood in his mouth – and who can blame him, with all the illnesses going around these days! – and his sense of taste had never been the same since the time his friend Exaggerrat had shoved some tremendine pellets up his nose for a joke. Everyone knows you don’t mess about with tremendine! He had run home shaking in the middle of the night, taken a hot shower, and written that strange excursion off as a scary but isolated episode, shutting it away in a small drawer of the memory-chest that he kept in his mind next to the bed of dreams (but a long way from the cupboard of nightmares!). He realised that the idea of the drawers didn’t really work that well, because he had remembered the episode only three or four days later.

He wasn’t going back to Psycheagle. What was the point of paying him crinkly giltleaves if he didn’t solve