“On Tuesday, August 18, in a year that would later be remembered as a year of mourning and amazement, three teenagers from Rivière-Brûlée, a village lost among the hills, had left the family home immediately after breakfast. lunch, as excited as if they were going to climb Everest […]. »
Climbing the highest peak in the world, however, would have been less perilous. Who would have believed it ! After all, they only went “camping by the river that gave their town its name”, where there had never been “no tragic death, no drowning, none of those dramas that give rise to legends […] “. And suddenly think Issuance. Without the images of John Boorman or the faces of Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, but with the powerful, oppressive pictures and feelings that Andrée A. Michaud, who studied cinema, draws with her words.
With preysound 13and novel, the author, twice winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award (for the rapture and for Buzzard), clothes those who live in Rivière-Brûlée in grief and transforms its paradisiacal surroundings into hell. Imposes this impression that she sees, smells, touches, hears and tastes her stories, her characters, her places in her head, before putting them down on paper. All the senses of the reader will, when the time comes, be challenged.
Anchored in nature, flirting on both sides of the border (not surprisingly, we recognize, under other names, places and landscapes already covered in the work of the novelist), prey follows Aby, Jude and Alex. They are 16 years old. In this weekend of pure freedom that closes their summer, they laugh, drink, swim, eat. Around the campfire, lulled by the night, Alex even recounts a memory, a surely-but-perhaps-not nightmare, a pale face that has haunted him since childhood. Here rises the little fantastic note that Andrée A. Michaud knows how to play in order to imbue her realism with disturbing and strangeness. The atmosphere then becomes cloudy. Anything can happen. And everything happens.
Thus, the carefree trio soon feels observed. Note traces of intrusion into the camp. And while the party is in full swing in the village, while parents, carefree, have fun; their children, like so many Tom Thumbs pursued by the ogre, must flee into the woods. These woods which, as such, are not dangerous. Who become so when the man sets foot there with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a completely gratuitous murderous madness. There will be disappearance – a theme dear to the writer. There will be survival, but at what cost. There will be deaths.
Played from right word to right word, interpreted to the rhythm of sentences that always follow the right rhythm – here running; there, basking —, prey is an intense psychological thriller. It explores the feelings and states of the victims, direct or collateral; but also those of the aggressors, direct or collateral. A powerful and deep drama where Andrée A. Michaud places her characters on a tightrope. His readers too.