The Laws of the Skies

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.

it’s not every day that a book provokes such a strong physical reaction in me.” – Rhian Sasseen, The Paris Review Staff Picks

“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

and that is what he does in this slim novel about a children’s camping trip gone horribly wrong. – New York Times, Summer Reads

“10 Scariest Novels” That is what Courtois aims to do ― shock and destabilize

About the Author

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. Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator. She received the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for Twenty-One Cardinals, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Les héritiers de la mine. And the Birds Rained Down, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Il pleuvait des oiseaux, was a CBC Canada Reads Selection. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, as were her translations of Élise Turcotte’s Guyana and Hervé Fischer’s The Decline of the Hollywood Empire. Rhonda currently lives in Montréal.

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