The contribution suggests a lecture of Nicola Pugliese’s novel Malacqua. Quattro giorni di pioggia nella città di Napoli in attesa che si verifichi un accadimento straordinario, in which we find a catastrophic natural event that puts a strain on the city from both the material and the cultural- psychological points of view. It tries, at least, to deal with the text from three points of view: the frirst one is the theory of the fantastic, because of the supernatural atmosphere that surrounds the catastrophe; the second one is that of the literary-anthropological studies about the representation of the apocalypse; the last one is the thougt of the waiting/expectation as a typical narrative theme of contemporary writing. Pugliese’s novel didn’t turn out to be a speech aimed to the representation of the apocalyptic instant, that is to say ‘detector of the disaster’. On the contrary it has proven to be a speech designed to the expectation of this ‘extraordinary event’ that can shake from the foundations each perceptive-cognitive category.