Buy a house in town? Unthinkable. Too expensive. Raising your child in the city? A heresy! Where will the toddler go to play, without a gigantic backyard?
Posted yesterday at 8:30 a.m.
As they await the arrival of their first baby, Jessica and Philippe are grappling with a classic dilemma, the perfect pretext for this captivating reinterpretation of the codes of fantastic literature that Myriam Vincent undertakes in At home.
After signing one of the most memorable first novels of 2020 with Furyin which she subverts the clichés of revenge slashers in order to delve in a way as lively as it is insightful into questions as sprawling as forgiveness and justice, Myriam Vincent sets in this second book a setting that is both disturbing and familiar.
Worrying, because this affordable house in which the couple settles far from the city, of an architecture and an oppressive whiteness, repels its visitors. Familiar, because it immediately appears very clear that their new residence carries a latency catastrophe. It’s written on the walls: what was supposed to be their dream house is hatching a nightmare.
There also rests a large part of the cunning of Myriam Vincent, who invests with finesse the springs of the genre of horror, while commenting, as if in the background, on their boring predictability. “If you think my reactions are weird and inadequate, it’s not just me to blame, then: it’s also the bad authors who only gave me these possibilities to live”, explains the narrator in a passage on the fictions that shaped – for better and above all for worse – his imagination.
Both feminist novel and page turneran anxiety-provoking fable about the torments of mental workload and black comedy, effective suspense and meta-commentary on the influence of fiction, At home depicts a society that endlessly challenges what women say, even as the evidence for what they say mounts before the eyes of those around them. Myriam Vincent thus adds a stone to a work that refuses to believe that wanting to entertain and give food for thought are incompatible ambitions.
At home
Myriam Vincent
Bush poets
322 pages