In a quiet suburb in the mid-1990s, nothing ever seems to happen. Then a teenage boy dies, and the adults are quick to call it suicide. His friends aren't so sure.





Drawn together by grief, boredom and a creeping sense that something is terribly wrong, a group of teens begins to fixate on an abandoned house at the end of a cul-de-sac – a place everyone avoids, although no one can explain why. Once the gang crosses its threshold, they find that, somehow, the house seems to know them – showing them what they long for most, feeding on their fears, their shame, their secret rage.





As the line between nightmare and waking life erodes, the group is forced to confront not only the house's sinister power, but the violence, cruelty and despair festering inside their families and their town.





An exhilarating celebration of Stephen King and cult slasher films, The Ravaged Night is an exceptional coming-of-age horror novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, one of France's most ambitious and exacting writers.



Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, born in 1981, is one of France's most exciting and ambitious young writers. He is the author of Pornographia [Porn], Le sel [Salt] and Une éducation libertine [A Libertine Education], which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. His fourth novel, Animalia, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in Frank Wynne's translation in 2019, was a TLS Book of the Year 2019 and won the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. The Son of Man, first published by Gallimard in 2021, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024. The Ravaged Night is his third book to appear in English.