The Ravaged Night (La nuit ravagée)

Saint-Auch, a small town on the outskirts of Toulouse, in the early 1990s. Between the Genêts housing estate and the Acacias residences, where modest families live, a gang of teenagers is growing up. They are bored, roam around on mopeds, are passionate about horror films and wait for the end of secondary school, preparing themselves for the same disappointments their parents encountered. All of them endure the cruelty of the group, confronting the emotions of desire, social injustice and the tragedies that have already marked their young lives.

In the housing estate, at the end of the impasse des Ormes, there’s a house they’ve always known to be abandoned, about which disturbing stories circulate and which exerts a strange power of attraction over them... When a local boy dies in terrible circumstances, the gang, suspecting that his death has something to do with the house, decide to go into the property. Little do they know that they are entering an alternate reality and that their lives will be changed forever.

Borrowing freely from the codes of the fantastic and horror novel to paint a portrait of an era, a generation and a social class rarely represented in literature, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo questions the meaning, ambivalence and violence of our lives: The Ravaged Night of Saint-Auch is the story of adolescence, but it is also our own.