Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s The Ravaged Night, a hypnotic
haunted-house novel in the tradition of Stephen King and late twentieth-century horror films.
The Ravaged Night will be published on 25 March 2027, simultaneously with Scribner in the
US and Text Publishing in Australia, in a translation by Frank Wynne. A film adaptation of
The Ravaged Night by Oscar-winning director Jacques Audiard for Netflix has been
announced.
Publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights, with
exclusivity in Europe, from Laurence Laluyaux at RCW on an exclusive submission. The
Ravaged Night will be Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s third novel with Fitzcarraldo Editions,
following Animalia and The Son of Man.
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 late twentieth-
century horror films, The Ravaged Night is an exceptional coming-of-age novel by Jean-
Baptiste Del Amo, one of France’s most ambitious and exacting writers.
Jacques Testard said: ‘Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is a novelist of immense talent and his new
novel The Ravaged Night is an exhilarating addition to his already stupendous body of work.
His twist on the horror genre is very playful, immaculately written and compulsively
readable. I was absolutely terrified and yet I could not put it down.’
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo added: ‘I have always dreamed of writing a horror novel that would
fully embrace the heritage of the genre while also having formal ambition and literary rigour
– a novel about my own adolescence, about the 1980s, and about the story of my generation.
The Ravaged Night is that book. It occupies a very particular place in France, as the first
horror novel ever published in Gallimard’s prestigious Collection Blanche. With it, I wanted
to bring together three things: the Anglo-American tradition of the page-turner, a whole
swathe of the cinematic culture (and counter-culture) of the 1970s and 80s, and the French
tradition of the social novel. I am honoured and humbled that it should now appear in
English, because it is a novel shot through with British and American references. Knowing
that this book and its characters will find their way into the imaginations of English-language
readers fills me with joy and gratitude.’
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, born in 1981, is one of France’s most exciting and ambitious writers.
He is the author of Pornographia, Le sel and Une éducation libertine, 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.
Frank Wynne has translated works by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick
Modiano, Virginie Despentes and Mathias Enard. His work has earned many awards,
including the IMPAC Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Premio Valle
Inclán.