A te penseranno gli avvoltoi is a frantic, obscene, meta-satirical picaresque about a narrator called Matteo, his friend Iurmiz di Bollate, a stolen porno-gore short-film idea, Tim Burton, Miley Cyrus, prison, fame, violence, literary ambition, and total personal collapse. It wants to be a comic novel, a confession, a prison memoir, a parody of toxic masculinity, a satire of literary prestige, a rant against class failure, a fake true-crime document, and a self-destroying performance of male resentment. Mostly, it is a long blast of noise that mistakes verbal excess for daring and repetition for comic momentum.
The book opens with Matteo and Iurmiz in the Milanese provincial wasteland, inventing what they believe will be a masterpiece short film: La fatina dei denti, “a porno-gore story.” The premise is deliberately stupid and deliberately repulsive. A beautiful tooth fairy visits children, collects teeth, returns home to a filthy hovel, eats sad food, watches trash TV, then is revealed to masturbate in a room full of children’s teeth, rot, blood, and insects. Matteo describes this as if it were high cinema, explaining camera movements, festival strategy, music cues, potential casting, and the intellectual meaning of the shocking final image. Iurmiz doubts some choices; Matteo insists his slow build is necessary because true viewers must understand the perversion before the final reveal.
The whole opening is the book in miniature: an ugly idea inflated into an artistic destiny, surrounded by pseudo-theory, festival fantasies, pop-culture name-dropping, sexual aggression, and class bitterness. Matteo and Iurmiz email Tim Burton with the pitch. Burton does not reply. Months later, while drunk and watching the Oscars, they see Burton win Best Picture for The Tooth Fairy, starring Scarlett Johansson as the fairy and an absurd constellation of famous actors as the child, mother, cats, and meta-versions of Matteo and Iurmiz. Burton has apparently stolen their idea and become even richer. The narrator and Iurmiz respond in the only way their universe understands: they plan to go to Hollywood and stab him.
