★ 03/25/2019
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. (May)
"Unflinching in its savagery, the nightmarish poetry of this modern Lord of the Flies is undeniable." – Publishers Weekly
"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… Courtois’ expertly orchestrated decimation melds into a brutal whole that leaves the reader shaken, though its final images will prove unshakable.” – Booklist, starred review
“Excellent...crystalline." – New York Times, Summer Reads
“Where can the line between the primal storytelling of fairy tales and horror stories be found? In The Laws of the Skies, which focuses on a camping trip gone horribly wrong, it becomes readily apparent that the border territory between those two types of stories can be its own fertile territory for captivating narratives.” – Vol. 1 Brooklyn, "May 2019 Book Preview"
“The ensuing story has a whiff of allegory: adults abandon their charges, classmates turn against classmates, and nature, quite literally, swallows them up. It’s unsettling. Along the way, Courtois raises pointed questions about the environment, the hereditary nature of evil, and the responsibilities of an older generation to the new. I felt absolutely nauseated by the end, and I have to admire that—it’s not every day that a book provokes such a strong physical reaction in me.” – Rhian Sasseen, The Paris Review Staff Picks
“Courtois’ new forest noir of children gone missing in the woods evokes myth, fairytale, and nightmare. The Laws of the Skies begins when a school trip to explore nature leaves a number of students stranded with a murderer, and only gets stranger from there. Also this one wins oddest comparison blurb — the publisher describes this book as ‘Winnie-the-Pooh meets the Blair Witch Project.’ In other words, irresistible!” – CrimeReads, "May's Best International Crime Fiction"
“A savage little book that reads like a cross between Lord of the Flies and a lost-in-the-woods slasher novel… an intense yet ambiguous critique of our love for violence.” – Brian Evanson for Publishers Weekly, “10 Scariest Novels”
That is what Courtois aims to do — shock and destabilize — and that is what he does in this slim novel about a children’s camping trip gone horribly wrong. – New York Times, Summer Reads
"The Law of the Skies is not an easy book to digest, and I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but I found it exhilarating to read a novel that’s this unflinching, this nihilistic, and also this deeply profound." – Locus Magazine
