It is one of our favorite novels of 2025. With La nuit ravagée, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo signs a dark and visceral coming-of-age tale, where horror reveals the unspoken truths of 1990s suburban France.
Five high school students see their world wobble at the brutal and troubling death of a classmate. Everything seems to lead them toward an abandoned house, which quickly becomes the focal point of all their anxieties, fears and fantasies. In La nuit ravagée, published by Éditions Gallimard in March 2025, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo plunges us with almost cinematic writing into a suburban neighborhood of the 1990s, outwardly calm, with its identical houses, neatly mowed gardens, and teens lingering about with nothing better to do.
This setting matters greatly. The suburban zone is presented as the showroom of a standardized society where everything is designed to erase rough edges. Between social chronicle, coming-of-age novel and horror narrative, La Nuit Ravagée recalls what that France at the end of the twentieth century had locked into, indulging in a culture of respectability, where domestic violence and family dramas are silenced, and where racism and homophobia are expressed openly. It renders this period without filter, like a closed room without screens, without internet, without direct ties to the rest of the world, where the characters move blindly. An absence of reference points and isolation that heighten the violence of the experiences.
A coming-of-age novel nourished by horror
In this frame, the author traces multiple adolescent trajectories and offers a piercing reading of this hazy stage between childhood and adulthood, where the awakening of sexuality, solitude, anger, and the inability to articulate what hurts mingle. By deploying expansive and imagery-rich prose, nourished by a nearly surgical sense of detail, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo excels at showing how the ordinary lives of these youths are traversed by an intensity that no one wants to see. Dysfunctional family, school harassment, the heritage of children of immigrants, bereavements… each one moves along a razor’s edge, finding in the group a refuge.
Being himself gay, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo approaches with finesse the awakening of gay desire, the longing that cannot be contained in a single category, which trembles first in silence, then in fear, and then in the attempt to name it. One can feel all that the 1990s carried in ignorance, shame, and rumors about HIV, which, far from urban centers, circulated with a scent of menace. The epidemic is a specter, a background hum that circulates, a form of subtext, like a second haunted house.
More than a horror story, La nuit ravagée offers a metaphor for the passage to adulthood and a novel about the ghost zones of the self, those that we suppress in adolescence and which eventually emerge from the shadows—even if it happens thanks to a visit to this house shrouded in a mystery that keeps readers in suspense in a diffuse anxiety that prevents putting the novel down before discovering its ending.
