What the Night Knows
Quotes from the Book
When no decision can be made, we go along with the decisions of those we trust, and if there is no one to trust, we follow the ones we love.
Before you become an adult, everything is off limits, and, once you become one, you aren’t allowed to do anything because you have to be responsible. When in life are we finally free? For good?
Don’t you ever want to start over? To go back to being the child our children are today and make choices other than the ones we made? Good or bad, just other choices.
Even he who deserves to die, who deserves to be killed, doesn't deserve to be killed like that.
We are all children, they thought, and none of us is equipped to deal with such an adversary. We go through life under other people's protection. We listen to instructions and try to follow them. We don't know what's true and what's not. What's fair and unfair. Our world is small. Our world is narrow. We do as we are told.
And there you have it. The children were on their way. They would never return.
Once again, between the century-old tree trunks, the nocturnal fauna heard a cry ring out, made by a small human, the wunderkind of the animal kingdom, master of fire and metal, but just as fragile when it collided with the laws of physics and the cosmos.
There is no time in what you are going through. Your suffering is a place, and you don't know whether you can ever leave this place. You don't even have enough hope to wish that it be over faster. Faster doesn't exist, any more than time itself. You are not alive enough to measure it. You live in a present of incessant pain.
Was there nothing left in this world that was worth opening your eyes and fighting for? Would the bad guys always win? Are our efforts to live in peace simply doomed to failure? Will the bad guys always be bad guys? Will the good guys spend their whole lives taking punches and throwing rocks into the water with all of their might and getting nothing more in return than a ridiculous sploosh and the shame of failure?
But now that day had broken, nothing had changed, no one had rescued them, and the possibility that that was how it would be the whole day, whole night, and all the other days, and all the other nights, had started to eat away at him right there, in his chest, at that blue place where tears are born and hope dies.
But she was in love, head over heels in love the way you are at age six, without knowing that this love would be as fleeting as it was powerful, and as powerful as it was secret, and misunderstood, an attachment, an obsession that Oceane had never called, nor would ever call `love'.
because it was him and him alone she didn't want to disappoint.
Without looking back or checking with each other, they plunged into the darkness of the woods, because there was no darkness scarier than the one about to give chase.
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About Grégoire Courtois
About the book
Twelve six-year-olds and their three adult chaperones head into the woods on a camping trip. None of them make it out alive.
The Laws of the Skies follows the terrified children as they scatter into the night to escape danger, dressed only in their pajamas. They face their darkest childhood fears and new imaginary threats, like trolls masquerading as boulders and child-eating tree trunks.
A harrowing story of those days in the woods, of illness, poisoning, and accidents; of a love triangle among tots; a pint-sized hero; and a child on a murderous rampage that comes to a grisly end. Part fairy tale, part horror story, this macabre fable takes us through the minds of all the members of this doomed party, murderers and murdered alike.
Book details
- First published
- 2016
- Author
- Grégoire Courtois
- Genre
- Horror
- Goodreads rating
- 3.36 (9k ratings)
Keep reading
What the Night Knows
Imaginary Friend
The Innocent
The New Hunger
Leave the World Behind
The Speaker
These Silent Woods
The Passage
Down Among the Sticks and Bones
Muse of Nightmares
Dangerous Boys
Dark Inside
Little Heaven
The World That We Knew
City on Fire
Girls on Fire
Every Heart a Doorway
The Darkest Part of the Forest
Perfect Ruin
The Summer Children
Snow Falling on Cedars
Cursed Bunny
Night Film
The Emperor of Gladness
The Atlas Complex
The Book Eaters
Rot & Ruin
The Girl and the Stars
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The Whisper Man
Running with the Demon
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Crown of Feathers
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Beneath the Sugar Sky
The Twelve
Notes on an Execution
Hold Tight
The Poet Empress
A Theory of Dreaming
To Paradise
The Soulkeepers
Liesl & Po
The Saturday Night Ghost Club
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
A Psalm of Storms and Silence
Dust & Decay
Sever
We All Looked Up
A Death in the Family
The Faith of Beasts
Ordinary Monsters
Full Dark, No Stars
Chances Are...
Fell
How High We Go in the Dark
The Infinite Sea
And the Mountains Echoed
Ninth House
The Quick and the Dead

