The Laws of the Skies

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However, the unspoken rules governing relations in Fred's little elementary class were hypothetical; did the rules still apply, now that a child had killed an adult? Without an indisputable authority figure, what remained? No one dared say that none of them were acquainted with or had ever eaten any wild fruit, or berries, or seeds, because they were too hungry and too ashamed and too everything. "Because," quite simply "because," plain, raw silence, the docile approval, there you have it, "because," because I want my mommy, because I want to go home, because I don't have the strength to think anymore, or the desire to lie, because. But Hugo stayed, gripped by an uncertain feeling he didn't understand that was threatening to spread through his entire body, the feeling of suddenly finding himself alone, without his mother, in a hostile forest that was growing darker, surrounded by people incidental to his life who could never understand or take the place of his mother, who, despite her frequent absences, always listened to him, always heard what he had to say, and was the only one who could anticipate his needs and allay his fears. Hugo didn't say any of this, not even to himself, but because of the irrational fear that an animal was crouched not far off in the bushes, somewhere, anywhere, lying in wait for him, the feeling was gnawing at him. That his mother could die, or at least disappear, leaving him forever lost and alone in the unsettling forest of his peers, was a possibility he had never really considered, let alone felt in his bones, until this faint twilight. Can you tell me a story, ma'am?" Enzo asked, pressed against this plump woman and burning with an affection that was brand new to him. "I cant get to sleep without a story," he lied, surprising himself at having come up with this strange request, he who despised stories, who hated being told them more than anything, who seethed with rage in listening to edifying tales in which a ridiculous moral turned the entertainment to a gaping wound from which the pus of the lesson seeped, as if no story, no life, no event on earth deserved to be told if it did not contain the inevitable lesson that people revel in and that bore to tears first their children, then their fellow creatures, and finally the unfortunate cohorts of future generations once they develop a taste for writing them.

The child's scowl pierced Fred's heart like a poison arrow. At just six years and a few months, this puny little being embodied the impotence the teacher sometimes felt. It's no secret and therefore no spoiler that this is a splatter story. Young children are dying and horribly - and all I can say is that it was pretty great. *lol*Unflinching in its savagery, the nightmarish poetry of this modern Lord of the Fliesis undeniable." – Publishers Weekly The little girl was trembling, her arms crossed against her torso, her mouth distorted in permanent sadness. When she closed her eyes, over and over she saw Fred's blood spattering by the campfire. She hadn't been able to sleep, hadn't even wanted to, huddled in the body heat of her slumbering classmates, but had stayed fully awake, eyes wide open to the dank darkness of the log. She couldn't get the horrific episode she had witnessed out of her mind, or understand it, or learn the slightest lesson from it. An adult, the only adult who was supposed to take care of her, had been killed, obliterated, destroyed, and this initial trauma reverberated in her, and its power destroyed every part of her budding personality. Dolls, princesses, sparkly dresses, pink strollers, a plastic stove, the "my darlings," the "my loves," life as she knew it, all the carefully constructed images of her future, assembled in miniature in her bedroom like a seed, like a fetus, that would grow, the stove becoming a real stove, the stroller a real stroller, and the dolly in it a real baby, on this stage, in this scale model that was the beginning and the end of her existence, none of it featured a smashed skull or spurting blood, and that was as it should be, but for Lilou, this posed a metaphysical problem. The event had infiltrated her, like a pebble in the gears, like a semicolon in a line of computer code, and she had crashed; she simply stopped functioning, her mind at least, her ability to think, her manner of perceiving the world. Nothing was working anymore, which was, to some extent, the case for all the children who had witnessed Fred's murder, but in Lilou it took on psychiatric proportions.

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.

Language and Publisher

The sun had come up, revealing a cloak of damp fog that had risen from the ground and gotten tangled in the trunks and the branches, gently cooling them to let them know that a new day had arrived, filled with the quiet savagery so typical of natural spaces, where plants try to develop faster than animals can consume them, and where animals try to draw on the plants' energy to avoid the fangs of their brethren for one more day. Except for Enzo, who was still sleeping, all those whom this tale has so far spared had seen the sky grow paler, and then the first rays appeared on the horizon, because their sleep had been light, punctuated by fretful wakefulness, stifled sobs, startled awakenings that dragged them out of nightmares in which trees, beasts, and monsters grabbed them to bring their travels to an end. The Morvan is a mountainous massif lying just to the west of the Cote d’Or escarpment in Bourgogne-Franche-Comte, France. It is composed of granites and basalts and formed a promontory extending northwards into the Jurassic sea. The Morvan has a strong musical tradition. At its heart is the protected area of the Parc naturel regional du Morvan. And the three little children, twisting on the ground, didn't want to die, here, in their vomit, but that was what was happening. But you need to understand, and not be scared, because a child doesn't die like you, an adult or an old person reading these lines. Children die without having had a chance to picture the end, without a sense of it being born and maturing within them. They die the same way they get lice or a skinned knee. They die without understanding, with their childish naïveté imagining death the way they imagine April showers, meteorological inevitabilities that eventually pass, not knowing or realizing that this inevitability does not pass. There is merit to writing the disgusting well, to writing what most would call poor taste. This does not mean everyone should read it. This is an extremely acquired taste. Proceed with caution. Don’t give as a gift, but seek it out if this review has caught your interest.

An audiobook is a recording that is primarily of the spoken word as opposed to music. While it is often based on a recording of commercially available printed material, this is not always the case. It was not intended to be descriptive of the word "book" but is rather a recorded spoken program in its own right and not necessarily an audio version of a book. The two boys couldn't hear their friend anymore, not her voice or even the splashing they had been able to make out just two minutes earlier, but that had given way to the terrible silence of water that no wind stirred. Nathan and Louis shouted, and shouted, even more fervently because they realized what had happened. They shouted to prolong the moment when they were both pretending to have hope, as if the sound of the desperate splashing of their friend's arms and legs as she drowned hadn't reached them, as if her little voice, filled with water and tears, had not called out "Mommy" a few metres in front of them, just a few metres, but still too far for them to come to her aid. They shouted to try to shed as much of their responsibility for the tragedy as they could, shouted to externalize the guilt that filled them. and it’s one of the best books i’ve read in a long time. not (just) because i’m a monster, but for the balls of its plot combined with the quality of its writing. i thought i knew what i was getting into; i figured it would be the same kind of fun as Bible Camp Bloodbath, but this book is more than satirical pulp horror—damn good writing and metafictional flourishes elevate it well out of the class of pulpy gore. which is an unfortunate phrasing, but also very apt. Her final word, "story," was swallowed up in the gurgle of the blood spurting from here severed carotid artery. It cuts well, Enzo thought. It slices through meat. "What good is an unfinished story?" Sandra tried to say, instead making a comical gurgle that, even to her, made no sense at all. What was there to say or think now that it was becoming clear that it would be the last thing she would ever say or think? Send her love to her husband? And what would he do with it? No, Jade. She's the one who deserves to be the focus of the last seconds of her existence. Think of Jade and send her all the love she could imagine. But she didn't manage it. And as she died, what Sandra had in mind was the terrible suspense she had created: would little Elliott call for help? Would he make a sound for the first time in his life and save the child, who, without him, would sink to the bottom of the canal and into the night that is waiting to fall on every one of us? How ridiculous. How sad that her last moments should be wasted on the fate of an imaginary child, a ghost she had conjured, caught in the web of her own fiction. I could have thought of my daughter while dying, she thought, but instead I'm thinking about some little ninny I invented.Bilberries, or occasionally European blueberries, are a primarily Eurasian species of low-growing shrubs in the genus Vaccinium, bearing edible, dark blue berries. you know* from the get-go that everyone in this book dies: twelve six-year-old children and their three adult chaperones bloodying up the french forest on the worst camping trip/darkest fairytale ever.