I Was Born of the Devil

The book begins on a July afternoon in 1963 on Boulevard Soult in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. The author tells it as if present with a camera: a 25-year-old young woman waiting at a bus stop, a van pulling up beside her, three men in snow masks, a scream. The abducted woman is taken to a cemetery, where the slab of a family tomb has already been removed. The woman escapes being buried alive. The author then reveals the hidden truth: the woman is the author's mother, and the masked «devil» is the father. The incident took place on 18 July 1963 at 13:30 and entered the police records; the author had just turned two.

The author presents this not as a secret but as an explanation of the creative work. Since starting to write novels, the question most often asked has been «where do such things come from?», and the answer is found in childhood: a childhood that looked happy but passed in the shadow of a horror story nobody wanted to tell. Then, on 2 February 2024, the 62-year-old author drives through snow in West Virginia to visit Aunt Sylvie, the father's sister. The author never knew the father: the parents separated a few months after the birth, the judge banned the father's visits, and the mother and grandmother hid the truth.

In 2005, at 44, the author fell into depression and, on a psychiatrist's advice, took medication and underwent eight years of psychoanalysis. The psychiatrist first told the author to settle the matter with the father. The «divorce file» given by the mother holds the papers of an eight-year legal struggle. On opening the first folder, a newspaper clipping appears: the mother's abduction by the father and the attempt to bury her alive. After arrest the father said it was «to punish». The author closes the folder and reads it only on the flight to the US. The conclusion: the father was neither a bad father nor a violent husband, the father was simply the devil.

From the third chapter the voice of the book changes: the story is told in the mother's voice. Twenty-two-year-old Michèle in the job in the 12th arrondissement, the Terrasse café in Saint-Mandé, the world of rich youths called «golden jackets», and the meeting with the son of a wealthy industrialist who says he studies medicine and drives an open Triumph. The author builds these parts in the voices of the mother and grandmother, most likely from documents and memories. The father's drinking, cruelty, fast driving and the hidden violence of the family (at dinner, the head of the family throwing a knife at a son) gradually appear.

The sixth chapter, in the grandmother's voice, describes the April 1961 wedding: the bride in a white suit, the groom in black, guests dancing rock and roll, and the grandmother worried that fear will rub off on the child in the bride's womb. The grandmother has heard that the groom's earlier marriage lasted less than a year and that in a night crisis he tore a sword from the wall and tried to run it into his wife: the family calls it «a moment of weakness». In chapter seven the author returns to childhood nightmares and takes refuge in the ghost train of the Foire du Trône, in horror films and later in thrillers, to turn fear not understood into aesthetic pleasure.

At the end of the part the author says all the novels are «altered autobiographies»: in the first novel the killer is the hero's father, in the second substitute fathers. This book the author calls «the final reckoning».

• The opening scene: a cinematic thriller language that gives every detail in close-up
• Three voices: chapters told by the author, the mother and the grandmother
• Police records, the court file and the divorce papers form the basis of the story
• Psychoanalysis and the concept of «sublimation» to explain the path to writing
• References to horror culture: the Foire du Trône, Hammer films, «The Exorcist»