The Laws of the Skies

By Gregoire Courtois

Winnie-the-Pooh meets The Blair Witch Project in this very grown-up tale of a camping trip gone horribly awry.

Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive. The Laws of the Skies tells the harrowing story of those days in the woods, of illness and accidents, and a murderous child.

Part fairy tale, part horror film, this macabre fable takes us through the minds of all the members of this doomed party, murderers and murdered alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: May 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781770565951

Gregoire Courtois

Grégoire Courtois lives and works in Burgundy, where he runs the independent bookstore Obliques, which he bought in 2011. A novelist and playwright, he has published three novels with Le Quartanier: Révolution (2011), Suréquipée (2015), and Les lois du ciel (2016). In 2013 he founded Caractères, an international book festival in Auxerre, which he continues to run. 

Book preview

I

The moms and dads had said goodbye to them through the school bus windows. Some of the children were crying as they waved goodbye, and others were chattering with each other as if they had never had parents. It was the first time any of them would be away from their home, their bed, and their blankie. Some of the parents were emotional; sending such young children away from their families, they thought, even well supervised, even just a handful of kilometres from home, was a big risk, maybe even traumatizing. But worried though they were, the parents weren’t going to go so far as to keep their children home from camp, weren’t going to let the others go while keeping their own precious offspring safe and sound, afraid they would miss out on memories and experiences that the group was going to have and would show off like shiny jewels.

So they all left, the twelve children from the Grade 1 class of the Claincy primary school in Yonne, accompanied by their teacher, Frédéric Brun, whom all the children called Fred; Sandra Rémy, Jade Rémy’s mother; and Nathalie Amselle, Hugo Amselle’s mother.

The bus pulled away along the village road, and the parents’ long shadows shrunk behind the condensation-covered windows.

And there you have it.

The children were on their way.

They would never return.

The lightly wooded plains to the south of Yonne start to blister and crack as you approach the Morvan mountain range. The carpet of green is dotted with taller and taller trees, and small rocks grow larger and larger until they split the earth and lift the ground. Very soon, as you continue south past Vézelay, the landscape becomes a curtain of tall trees and chaotic topography that strangle contour lines. In the undergrowth running alongside the bus’s route, you can detect the presence of more and more wild animals – deer, foxes, buzzards – but the unruly, excited, noisy children were not concerned by them, had not listened to Fred’s insightful explanations, and kept laughing, talking, singing, kicking each other under the seats.

‘Frédéric, I don’t know how you don’t have a headache every night when you get home,’ Sandra Rémy said.

‘They’re excited about the trip,’ the teacher said. ‘They’re not always this rowdy.’

He smiled, but his smile appeared frozen in worry rather than natural when he looked at Nathalie Amselle.

‘Are you okay, Nathalie?’ he asked.

‘I’m okay,’ Nathalie said. ‘My stomach is just a bit upset. Something I ate didn’t agree with me, I guess.’

Sandra Rémy saw the look exchanged between Nathalie and Frédéric, and in the space of an instant, the furtive thought crossed her mind that there might be something between the two of them, something beyond the cordial relationship expected between parents and teachers. Was she the foil for a class trip whose sole purpose was to indulge the desires of lovers having an extramarital affair? The mere shadow of this idea made her slump scowling in her seat, hoping her hunch would be quickly proven wrong.

‘I ’m going to park over there, on the shoulder,’ the driver said. ‘The dirt road is just a hundred metres away, and if I head down it, we might get stuck in the mud.

‘Okay,’ Fred said, putting on his backpack.

Then, turning, he said, ‘Okay, kids, this is it! I want you to put all your trash in the trash bags, and don’t forget anything. Another bus will be picking us up, so take a good look around.’

The bus stopped, and the children’s clamour filled up the space, a terrible racket that went straight through the head of Sandra Rémy, who, wide-eyed, was horrified at the idea that the trip had just started and already she had the burning desire to scream and hit any one of the crazed little demons.

A few minutes later, the bus was pulling away in a nauseating cloud of thick smoke, and the little group, backpacks on, was headed to the dirt road that led into the forest.

‘Look carefully around you, children,’ Fred shouted, ‘and tell us if you recognize a plant or an animal that we studied in class, okay?’

The instructions made the somewhat ordered ranks of the fragile procession fall out, and the children started amusing themselves in uneven clumps on either side of the road. The walk was seriously slowed: the children were crouching and kneeling, some were even lying on the ground to observe moss, lichen, dead wood, beetles, and slugs, in a noisy assortment of exclamations, invectives, and vague questions for the teacher, although none of them listened to the answers.

‘What happens when you crush a snail?’ Enzo asked Lilou.

She stared at him, eyes wide with terror, before turning to look at his raised foot, which was threatening to come crashing down on a little snail’s bright yellow shell. Enzo was sporting his usual smile, and it was hard to tell whether it was the smile of a deranged child or a deliriously happy one. Regardless, anyone who met Enzo found him to be a creepy little boy, even if it was just an unpleasant sense of foreboding. The violence that came through in everything he did and everything he said made him a danger to be avoided. In his presence, people got in touch with their primitive survival instincts. Without realizing it, they tried to avoid him, and when they found themselves stuck with him, they feared the situation could degenerate at any moment. Little Lilou had that very feeling when Enzo slowly lowered his foot onto the snail, in silence, so that the sinister crack of the shell being crushed could be heard loud and clear. An irrepressible sob rose in her throat.

‘A crushed snail is just a slug!’ Enzo yelled, laughing like a boy unhinged.

And he took off running, zigzagging through the tree trunks on the carpet of rotting leaves. Lilou swallowed her saliva, came back to her senses as if waking from a dream, and looked around her. A few metres away, Sandra, Jade’s mom, was petrified. She had seen what had happened without daring to intervene. Lilou knit her brow, her eyes dark and lightly veiled with tears, and ran toward a group of friends. Enzo’s laugh echoed through the undergrowth.

Nathan, Louis, and Océane were the best friends in the world. They did everything together, gathered together every day at recess and would have liked to sit together in class, if Fred hadn’t separated them because of their endless chatter. On weekends, they went over to each other’s houses and sometimes even managed to talk their parents into letting them spend a few days of vacation together. None of them knew it was love, but clearly Nathan loved Océane, Océane loved Louis, and Louis loved his two friends with pure, unshakable devotion.

Today, as was their habit, they wandered away from the other students, carried off in a fantasy of their making, entering the woods by diving stealthily from thicket to thicket, from holly bush to bright bramble patch. Océane was hunting forest trolls. She was commanding the elements, making the treetops bow, rendering water potable, and conjuring flames with just her voice. Nathan was her faithful assistant, whose duties consisted of carrying her things and collecting ingredients for his mistress’s spells and potions. As for Louis, he was pretending to be a mysterious wild man, half human, half wolf, whom the enchantress had just met and who offered to guide her to the trolls’ secret lair. The three friends blazed a trail through the trees and seemed to be heading into the depths of the dense, fabulous forest, but, in fact, the children’s path was merely tracing a line parallel with the dirt road, their fear and diligent obedience ensuring that they never lost sight of it.

‘What was that sound?’ Nathan asked.

Louis tried to offer a fantastic explanation in keeping with his role as a wolf man, but he was somewhat worried and settled for shrugging his shoulders. The three children looked at each other in silence, and Océane winked before setting off at a brisk pace in the direction of the mysterious sound. Caught off guard, the two boys had no choice but to trot shamefully behind her. A few metres later, they discovered their friend lying on her belly near the trunk of an ash, her face contorted, wide-eyed, staring at a pale shape raising its flaccid roundness some fifty centimetres above the ground. There was no doubt that this was where the awful noise, and other more disgusting things, was coming from, producing a thundering roar, a thick gurgling punctuated by muffled explosions, the echo of which rebounded off the bark of the trees.

You would have to have no sense of sight, sound, or smell not to realize that Nathalie Amselle was truly sick, and the stunned children faced with this excremental scene realized it in the most shocking of ways, cheek to cheek with the rosy posterior of a woman who seemed to contain more poop than the septic tank they sometimes spotted when peering down the hole of the old-fashioned squat toilets in the aging recreation centre buildings. Unaware that three little sets of eyes were staring at her backside, Nathalie was crouched and moaning, contorting herself to expel the ochre pulp from her body, finally collapsing onto her hands and knees to vomit whatever lingered in her stomach. Her soiled bum exposed, bile dripping down her chin, her eyes met those of the children and, although a wave of shame initially washed over her, the compassionate, concerned, understanding looks of the three friends prevented her from feeling too pathetic.

‘Are you sick, ma’am? Do you want me to get Fred?’ Océane offered.

‘Oh, no. Please don’t! No, thank you, children,’ Nathalie replied, wiping her bum with a handful of dead leaves. ‘I’ll be fine. Go back and join the others and don’t stray too far from the path.’

The enchantress, her assistant, and the wolf man nodded, and the three set off running in the direction of their classmates’ cries and laughter.

‘F red! Enzo kicked me!’

Yasmine was holding her knee, aping intense pain, and limping along the dirt road, leaning on her friend Emma.

‘Enzo!’ Fred yelled. ‘Come here!’

‘I’m right here,’ said a flat voice behind him, making Fred jump in surprise and, without wanting to admit it, a bit in fear as well, realizing that this child seemed to have the power to appear behind his victims and maybe even disappear just as quickly if threatened or cornered. He had never known how to talk to Enzo or how to make him understand the basic rules of life in society. Every explanation and admonition slid off him like water off sheet metal: smooth, cold, insensitive, sharp. And yet, out of habit or because he had exhausted every other pedagogical approach in his arsenal, Fred continued to scold Enzo when he caught him doing something wrong. His words fell on deaf ears, but at least the other students would see that no one was above the rules. This was the absurd song and dance that had just started.

‘Why did you kick Yasmine?’ Fred asked.

‘Because she was in my way,’ Enzo replied.

‘And you couldn’t just talk to her about it?’

‘There’s no point talking to some people. You have to smack them. It’s the only thing they understand.’

Fred stared, wide-eyed. ‘That’s not the least bit true! Who

Reviews for The Laws of the Skies

[Amber Bettis · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Nothing but torture porn. No happy ending, just 147 pages of torture and death of small children. I’m all for a bleak ending but this book was disgusting.

[Rosa Harris · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

That was brutal. I don't recall the last time I was this shocked and shook by a book. I devoured it quickly in one sitting, but I know its going to stick with me. Read at your own risk...

[morgan coady · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was well written, but no way these characters are first graders. They don't speak like this. Maybe if the characters were older it would have been better? Lots of gore involviñg kids so reader beware.

[Alexandra Jane Welcome · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I technically give this a 3.5 stars. I enjoyed a lot of this but I found the dialogue and inner thoughts to be way too mature for six year olds. No child speaks and thinks the way these kids were written. I decided halfway through that I would pretend the kids were actually 12-13, possibly even older. I enjoyed most of the story regardless. It felt like we were finding out details of what really happened to a mysterious mass killing that was never solved til this book. It is very gory though involving kids, so be forwarned.

[amuskopf-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I received this book as part of LibraryThing’s early reviewer program.I can honestly say I have never read anything like The Laws of the Skies. I thought the style, the way the narrative flowed from place to place, was interesting and well done. It felt dreamlike and nightmarish. The imagery was graphic and striking, not too different than in some thrillers I've read. But when I finished it I could only think about how pointless it all was, and if it was any longer I wouldn't have finished it.

[chucknorton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Gregoire Courtois. "The Laws of the Skies" ("Le Lois du Ciel"), translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2019In this grim little novel, first published as "Les Lois du Ciel", and in this edition translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins, Gregoire Courtois revives the classic fairy tale- the story mined from ancient folklore- that of children who fall victim to demonic forces. It's quite old fashioned in its way, in that it vehemently eschews the comforting modern sanitizing of the horrific old yarns. There are plenty of modern stories in which children are threatened by evil, but they are almost always rescued before the end, or they rescue themselves by becoming little heroes who vanquish the evil. Not so in Courtois' relentless "The Laws of the Skies"This is a novel of pure horror. It resembles William Golding's "Lord of the Flies", except that "Flies" has a more "optimistic" view of basic human nature. The story is about a group of six year old French kids and their adult chaperones who are annihilated while on a camping trip in the mountains. Some of them are murdered by Enzo, the little psychopath among them, and others fall victim to accident as malevolent nature and cruel fate conspire to create a massacre. Courtois seems to revel in the tradition of the Grand Guignol.

[ireneattolia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

this book feels to me like one of those indie horror movies you find scrolling through netflix late at night; gore-y, kind of depressing, and trying to be super deep but just coming across as a little silly. still, like those movies, it's pretty fun if you just take it at face value.

[over.the.edge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Laws of The Skysby Gregoire CourtoisTranslated from French by Rhonda Mullins2016/2019Coach House5.0 / 5.0Thanks to LibraryThing, the author and publisher for sending this ARC.I'd describe this amazing story as 'Lord Of The Flies' gone rogue. The innocence of a child, stolen with no remorse, from another child incapable of remorse....how the environment and things we see as young children can influence who we become as adults.....are at work here.A group of 12, six year olds with their teacher, Frederic, and two chaperones, take a bus to a camp ground deep in the forest to spend a weekend camping.No one makes it out alive.One of the 6 year olds, Endo, is punished for his behavior. Endo is a creepy weird kid, who blungeons the teacher to dead with a stone in front of all the others. They scatter when this happens, and are one by one met with their demise attempting to escape the evil Endo.Innocence vs. EvilWicked vs. PureThe themes in this dark and brutal story are so well done. How will the children react?? How far will they go to escape the pursuit of danger??Courtois is a writer with such deep mastery, with such a precise and clean style to a terrifying story. The slow measured pace, even knowing the eventual outcome for the students, makes this even more chilling and unsettling. I highly recommend this one!

[dgrachel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh. My. God. What did I just read? I received a copy of this from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program and I just have to say thank you to them because...holy (expletive). This book was insane - intense, terrifying, horrifying, and absolutely impossible to put down. A class of a dozen six-year olds and three adult chaperones go on a weekend trip to the forest. No one survives. This is not a spoiler. The reader is told that on the first page. But the ways in which everyone dies are a combination of sad, unexpected, and depraved. The writing is gorgeous and graphic. This is a book that is going to stick with me even though I kind of want to scrub the horror from my brain. My only quibble is sometimes the kids think or say things and I just can’t picture six year olds thinking or acting in that way. Mind you, I don’t have kids of my own, so I can’t honestly say for sure, but it did pull me out of the story a bit, hence 4 stars, not 5. The publisher’s press release calls this “Winnie-the-Pooh meets The Blair Witch Project” and I would add take that and mix it with a bit of The Lord of the Flies. If you like horror or thrillers, definitely give this a shot, but don’t read it at bedtime and make sure you have something cheery to chase it with. I may never sleep again and I’m absolutely never going into a forest ever again.