Thank you to the publisher for allowing me to read and review this ARC. Full review to be found on Goodreads and on my website.

Definitely not what I expected.

The Laws of the Skies is part horror and part fairy tale.

Overall the story of fifteen people going into the woods on a camping trip and not one surviving was so well written that it kept me up for several nights after reading it.

Superb Job!

Thanks to NetGalley for a Kindle ARC of The Laws of the Skies.

Initially, I couldn't review this title because the PDF wouldn't open for me so I waited until my local library had a copy and requested it.

I sort of knew what to expect from the reviews I've read earlier but, wow, nothing compared to the real thing.

The Laws of the Skies is a bloody, gore-filled novella about a group of first graders on a camping trip when everything and anything goes wrong, especially when amongst them is a Damian in training.

The sheer violence and shocking brutality was like getting punched in the face. In a good way? I dunno since this is about a bunch of little kids so that was hard to stomach, but I admire the author in pulling no punches.

He describes each tragic accident, painful accident or misfortune and horrifying murder in plain language; no words are wasted, which makes reading it all the more heart-wrenching.

What's the point of the story?

Hmmm...I'm not sure I know. The novella is sparse, less than 150 pages, which means no exposition or details are given.

What was the point of introducing Enzo, a psychopath in training? (I did love his demise.)

Is the author trying to say that life and reality is brutal, no matter your age?

That not everyone gets saved in this world?

That life isn't fair?

Okay, let's go with that.

The Laws of the Skies is not for the faint of heart, especially since children are involved. Read at your own risk.

This book is not for everyone. It is a horror novella and no one survives. I do think the book would have been more believable if the children were a little older. The story is very well written and the book is a quick disturbing read. Not for the faint of heart.

Great characters, compelling plot, amazing setting. Will definitely recommend this book. Can't wait for the public to discover it!

An excellent story. Very gory but that just added to the creepiness. I really enjoyed this and hope to read more from this author in the future.

A French ‘Battle Royale’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘The Laws of the Skies’ is a terrible book on many levels. Firstly the translation from French to English is dreadful - with clunky English prose filled with unnatural turns of phrase.
Secondly the story… A camping trip in a French forest that goes horribly wrong, when a 6 year old boy goes postal. This was the part that really didn’t work for me. Even if the kid has been horribly abused (spoiler alert), I just don’t see a small kid being either focused or able to carry out a lengthy killing spree.
You know from the start that nobody makes it out of there alive, and there are some inventive slaughters, and also several characters who escape death at the hands of Evil Enzo, only to perish in other tragic ways.
If they’d made the kid a bit older, this could have been a bit more plausible and probably a lot more horrific. As it is, you just read it thinking “really?????”. It might have read a bit better in its original French, but I doubt it would have improved things much. Avoid it like a small child with a knife.

This novel, intended possibly as a latter-day, more grotesque Lord of the Flies, is unfortunately poorly written . badly conceived, and almost unreadable. I don't know what the intended audience is, I can't tell what the purpose of some of the asides are, and I can't figure out why anyone published this as it is. I thought perhaps it was the translation that is bad, but I read a few passages of the original French online, and it's terrible too. Don't bother with this one.

The Laws of The Skys
by Gregoire Courtois
Translated from French by Rhonda Mullins
2016/2019
Coach House
5.0 / 5.0
#netgalley. #TheLawsOfTheSkys
I'd describe this amazing story as 'Lord Of The Flies' gone rogue. The innocence of a child, stolen with no remorse, from another child incapable of remorse....how the environment and things we see as young children can influence who we become as adults.....are at work here.

A group of 12, six year olds with their teacher, Frederic, and two chaperones, take a bus to a camp ground deep in the forest to spend a weekend camping.
No one makes it out alive.
One of the 6 year olds, Endo, is punished for his behavior. Endo is a creepy weird kid, who blungeons the teacher to dead with a stone in front of all the others. They scatter when this happens, and are one by one met with their demise attempting to escape the evil Endo.
Innocence vs. Evil
Wicked vs. Pure
The themes in this dark and brutal story are so well done. How will the children react?? How far will they go to escape the pursuit of danger??
Courtois is a writer with such deep mastery, with such a precise and clean style to a terrifying story. The slow measured pace, even knowing the eventual outcome for the students, makes this even more chilling and unsettling. I highly recommend this one!

Thanks to the author, and publisher and netgalley for this e-book ARC for review.

A camping trip gone horribly wrong, this is a novella that hits the ground running and simply does not stop. It's unapologetically gruesome with enough meat in the writing to stop it becoming a throwaway slasher fest. Very much Lord of the Flies meets And Then There Was One.

The only real thing going against it was the children simply don't read as six year olds, but given the story and the suspension of belief needed for the story to work, it's a minor complaint.

Admittedly, The Laws of the Skies wasn't quite my thing, but I suspect Horror book fans who like their stories darker than a black hole and glorier than an afternoon at a abattoir will be delighted with it.

With thanks to Netgalley and Coach House Books for the ARC

Brutal and oddly uncomfortable, this book about a camping trip gone wrong is disturbing to say the least. When every character in a book dies, it is simply alarming! Not sure about my rating on this, but it is well written.

...this book literally got me to smile (besides the killing and the sad ending). I guess the content was neatly written but the context was gruesome. Reminded me of happy tree friends.

Gruesome, horrifying, unputdownable.
Would recommend this to those macabre ghouls like me who would enjoy reading a chilling nightmare of children lost in the woods dying in horrible ways

The story is short (about 150 pages), and its brevity allows for the satisfaction of getting to the nitty-gritty without any superfluous fluff. Three adults and twelve six-year-olds are on a weekend camping trip deep in the woods and no one lives. That’s not a spoiler. The author also cleverly inserts some philosophical threads about the perspectives of children and uses narrative intrusion to address the reader and remind him that there is no hope for these poor kids.

To say any more would be a disservice, so if this premise causes you to raise an eyebrow and immediately look it up online, this book is for you. If you recoil and say, “Ew,” then move along.

I am loath to say I enjoyed it for fear it may cause others to think me psychotic, so I’ll just say that it was a riveting read.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Coach House Books for the copy in exchange for my review.

If ‘And Then There Were None’ was done with kids, this story follows a troop of 6-year old campers and their adult guides. What happens when one of the children turns out to be a crazed psychopath? Death, gore, blood and carnage, that’s what! I enjoyed every single second of this book and would recommend it to absolutely no one because I don’t know many people that would enjoy seeing kids dying and being murdered in such horrific ways. Me, however, needs a physical copy of this book ASAP so I can add it to my yearly reading circuit.

Received via Netgalley. All reviews and opinions are expressly my own

A savage, vicious fairy tale of horror. The dark woods, lost parents, murderous kids, dead bodies, toxic fruits, and WILD BOARS. It's not a spoiler, but definitely a needed trigger warning, that children die and that they also inflict pain. It got under my skin and gave me weird hallucinatory nightmares. A surrealist exploration of what happens when meaning breaks down in society and only survival matters. Maybe a metaphor for our current level of civilisation?

Perhaps another consciously avant-garde technique was the depiction of the children; not so much as "authentic" depictions of children (can adults ever do that, even if they attempt it?) but with a consciously psychological view of the children's thoughts. They are children as how adults imagine children to be. It's a distancing technique from the horror, to make the reading bearable, but it was also especially poignant and made the story less of a shock-value tale, and more nuanced and scary.

Having said that, there's like a seven-year-old Patrick Bateman in here, so it's not a book I would comfortably recommend to anyone. Unless you dig the bleak and macabre, in which case, go for it.

I really wanted to like this – I love horror, I love literary horror, and I love translated fiction. But something about it just didn't click for me. Perhaps it's that although I think I love all horror, I don't actually like gore that much? I also found it quite predictable – we know from the start that everyone dies, so the rest of the book is just a case of waiting to see exactly what gory death they suffer (which I guess is part of the enjoyment of the Final Destination films, but at least they're often something unexpected and bizarre). I didn't find that enough of a draw to pull me through the book. I'd read more from this author, but this one didn't really work for me.

Grégoire Courtois' The Laws of the Skies requires a bit of warning: it is dark, very dark!! If you avoid twisted horror/fairy tales, as a rule, then this one is not for you. In the description and on the first page, we learn that twelve children in a grade 1 class go on a camping trip and they never return. There are no happy endings and we are pulled along to experience the deaths of the adults and the children (some accidental; some at the hands of an evil little six year old, Enzo). It wasn't always an easy read, but it was an enjoyable and quick read. Recommended.

Thanks to the author, Coach House Books, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.

This is both, an easy book to read and one of the hardest I’ve ever read. The way the story is written is so engrossing that it’s very hard to put it down (it is also a very short text). The content, though, is unbearable because it deals with the death of children. We know from the beginning that no one will survive this camping trip but we don’t know why or how. There are three adults in charge of 12 children and, once you remove two of the grownups and add a child with psychopathic tendencies, everything goes wrong surprisingly fast. The environment is described in detail but it doesn’t slow down the action at all. The psychology of most of the characters is not too exhaustive and the main baddie’s motivations are not so clear but, since it reads like a dark fairy tale, it didn’t bother me. Plus, they are children and they tend to call for their mothers at the first sign of trouble. Some scenes were hard to read but it’s so well written that it was hard to look away. A very, very dark story that’s worth reading.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Coach House Books!

Oh my word! I'm not sure what I just read or how I should rate this!

The Laws of the Skies is definitely outside of my usual comfort zone. Based on the blurb ("Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive."), I was not expecting this to be a light read. But I maybe underestimated just how dark things could get.

Although this is well-written and quite a short read, it took me several weeks to complete this one because I just couldn't read much of it in any one sitting. For those of you who appreciate darker fare, this should be a very quick and enjoyable read for you.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4 for this one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Coach House Books for providing me with a DRC of this book.

Whoa.
Just. Whoa.
I read the description. I knew kinda what was coming. But I still don't think I was ready!
What a gruesome, horrible book - I liked it! I haven't read a horror like genre style in a long time, and I thought this was very good. 12 kids, 3 adults, camping trip. Its not much a "who dunnit" as you find out early who the killer is, but you get to follow that killer on their bloody quest. Definitely not for the faint of heart!