Les Carnivores, by Guillaume Nail

Panic: epidemics rage, humans are dying, and the culprits are ready-made: animals. Mass culls, a strict ban on pets, plant life prohibited, tyrannical hygienism as the only hope. This is the hell into which Guillaume Nail’s second novel plunges us. Two protagonists, both intimately attached to Nature and to animals, one out of sincere love, the other out of voracious need.

Augustin has an idyllic childhood in the countryside, surrounded by loving parents and cherished animals. This illegal haven is wiped out by yet another wave of epidemic. Tragically orphaned, the young boy has no choice but to blend into the new plastic world taking shape.

Vadim, bulimic for flesh, an inveterate masculinist, lecherous and violent, sees the State’s great coercive decisions coming from his desk at work. He decides to flee the city before it is sealed off and to create an Eden sheltered from the world, recruiting souls as desperate and hollow as his own. On the program: orgies worthy of ancient bacchanals, gargantuan feasts, but also sweat, blood, and fury.

When Emad bursts into Augustin’s life, Augustin is for the first time burned by desire and the promise of somewhere else. That is all it takes for him to flee the sterile prison his life has become. He climbs over the wall and plunges into nature, forbidden, wild, and sovereign. Madness. At death’s door, the wheel of fate leads him not to the promised love but straight into the lair of the bloodthirsty Vadim. In language by turns poetic and corrosive, this text, saturated with bodily fluids, urges, and heresy, gives love no chance at all. A genuine jolt, this prophetic fable is a cry from the heart.