The Laws of the Skies

Starred review from March 25, 2019
Courtois’s first novel to be translated into English, a haunting avant-garde thriller, begins like a fairy tale but winds up more like a Friday the 13th movie. Twelve six-year-old schoolchildren leave their parents for a weekend at camp with their teacher Frederic and two chaperones; readers know from the first page that none of them will return. Death and fear seem to stalk the children, not a natural fear but “all the fears that used to fill our days and our imaginations... in the dark, with the whispers of the trees and the invisible beasts.”
The adults try to calm the students with fables and campfires, but violence erupts when the sociopathic—if not altogether evil—child Enzo bludgeons Frederic to death with a rock before turning his attention to his fellow students, whom he hunts one-by-one throughout the night that follows. Alone in an unforgiving nature and soon separated from any semblance of adult supervision, the brutality of the world is suddenly laid bare for children. Among them, the precociously mature Hugo dares to take a stand against Enzo in a desperate attempt at survival. Unflinching in its savagery, the nightmarish poetry of this modern Lord of the Flies is undeniable. Courtois writes that “a story without a point destroys civilization a little,” and far from being an exercise in idle cruelty, this wicked novel plumbs the darkest reaches of childhood fears and finds plenty to be afraid of.

Starred review from May 15, 2019
From the first, Courtois creates no illusion to mask the fates of the first-grade class heading into the woods, or of their teacher and two parents: no one survives this camping trip. The French know how to push horror's boundaries, and Courtois is no exception. In this sliver of a novel, he gradually picks off his cast, mounting tension by juxtaposing horrific action with the children's innocence and an innocuous setting. At its simplest, it is a field trip gone awry, beginning with the exit of the chaperones?one becoming ill and needing an escort home. Thus, the teacher is left alone with 12 six-year-olds, including a rage-filled boy who decides that this is his opportunity to find out exactly what he's capable of. Fluid narration dips into the consciousness of myriad characters, child and adult, sometimes changing perspective within the same paragraph?an effective means of showing simultaneous action with maximum efficiency, and injecting empathy into an increasingly hostile environment. So, too, a grim children's fable told around the campfire swirls through the narrative, echoing the pain rippling through the forest to which the reader is afforded an inescapable bird's-eye view. Courtois' expertly orchestrated decimation melds into a brutal whole that leaves the reader shaken, though its final images will prove unshakable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)