Kevin Lambert

The main action of You Will Love What You Have Killed, Kevin Lambert’s angry, violent and surreal debut novel, takes place in a reimagined Chicoutimi, Quebec, a place rife with homophobia, ghosts, perversion, abuse and neglect, magic and superstition, murder and suicide, not to mention countless manifestations of bad luck. The story, as such, is more-or-less a recounting of numerous horrific deaths reported graphically and with darkly comic zeal. Our narrator is Faldistoire, whose oddities do not end with his name. Faldistoire’s unmitigated loathing for the town of his birth drives a series of dark revenge fantasies in which Chicoutimi and everything in it is obliterated by ultra-violent means. The narrator bleeds hatred for Chicoutimi and its adult authority figures, who refuse to accept Faldistoire for who he is. Make no mistake, this is a deeply disturbing work of fiction, but it is also utterly original and written with extraordinary energy and commitment to its twisted rendition of the contemporary world. The events described in the novel are especially hard on Chicoutimi’s children. Faldistoire’s next-door neighbour (“best friend by default”) Sylvie dies in grisly fashion after crawling into a snowbank just before the snowplough arrives. Another friend, Sébastien, falls victim to his own father’s murderous, suicidal rampage. But the story of the children does not end there: though dead, they continue to age and attend school and do all the things that children do while growing up, chief among them: getting into mischief. Perhaps the book’s most hapless character is cleverly named Kevin Lambert: driver of the snowplough, who, traumatized by Sylvie’s death, fired from his job, becomes unmoored. Kevin later has a son (who dies a particularly gruesome death), and later still becomes the teenage Faldistoire’s lover. The apocalyptic denouement is brought about in part by Kevin leaving town, which Faldistoire regards as abandonment and a betrayal. You Will Love What You Have Killed—originally published in Quebec in 2017, nominated for several literary awards, and now available in a sturdy English translation—is a profoundly challenging novel that never once tries to evoke a sympathetic response in the reader. Instead, the deeper into the story we get, the more destruction and mayhem we witness, the harder it is to turn away: undeniably gripping, but in the sense of a train wreck unfolding before our eyes. And adding to the reader’s challenges: the story does not follow a strict chronological timeline and at times comes across as disjointed and disorienting. Emphatically not a novel for the faint of heart, but adventurous readers and students of modern fiction will find of interest the many ways the author thumbs his nose at commonplace narrative conventions.… (more)