Every November, the four of them (Anabelle, Walid, Philippe and Rémy) get together for a weekend of hunting on the land they own together deep in Quebec’s Mauricie region. They are thirty-five and have known one another since childhood, but a terrible secret, one almost too heavy to bear, is tearing them apart. The survival of their friendship may depend on nothing more than these trips, which have become a tradition.
When Walid and Philippe fail to return to camp at the end of the first day, Anabelle and Rémy fear the worst. For some time now, Walid has been restless and preoccupied with death, and his substance use has grown worse. The night before, he and Philippe nearly came to blows. And that morning at dawn, a single gunshot rang out through the cold, damp forest air.
They might simply be lost. But deep down, Anabelle has her doubts. Here, more than anywhere else, she has always felt a pull, a dizzying, irresistible hunger that is her gift, and perhaps her curse.
A horror thriller about predestination and the fragility of free will, Les ravisseuses tells of four children on the verge of adolescence who brutally lose their innocence, and of their failure to rebuild themselves as adults. In the tradition of the great works of supernatural horror, from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King and Mariana Enríquez, Charles Dionne’s first novel asks what remains irreducible in our darkest and most reprehensible acts. Do our crimes define us forever? Are some of us born destined for evil? And what does it mean, then, to let go of our sense of guilt and embrace our true nature?
