“Demon’s blues, false bildungsroman, demonic epic, story of a downfall… the paths of interpretation are multiple.
Mutilation Song, magnificently translated by Claro, is a powerful novel, as fascinating as it is disturbing.”
— Guillaume Richez
Japanese article by Motoyuki Shibata
Prominent translator and scholar Motoyuki Shibata has published an article discussing Mutilation Song in the Japanese web-journal Kangaeru Hito (“Thinker”). The article examines the book alongside The Organs of Sense, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, both novels having been recommended by American writer Brian Evenson.
Review in Belgian culture magazine Focus Vif
“A disturbing, delirious, suffocating assault—upon the family, the illusion of a protective hearth, the supposed solidarity of human beings—that one would, however, have to be wrongheaded not to admire the mastery and power.”
— François Perrin
French edition reviewed in webzine Diacritik
“The evil here does not reside in the tortures and abuses that Dinn, the demon, sends in visions to his anti-Saint-Antoine… but in the disaffection that he arranges, in the rupture of all personal ties. On closer observation, Mutilation Song, like The Plight House before it, is, strangely, a book about love.”
— Lucien Raphmaj
Review of French edition in webzine Un Dernier Livre
“Beyond the vertigo of contemplating a gem of pure cruelty, Jason Hrivnak is a writer without equal. A striking style, of the meticulously-crafted word… And all superbly translated by Claro, translator of the impossible, who renders into French this subtle language full of traps.
A tremendous book, to read with caution.”
— Paco Vallat
French radio review of Mutilation Song
“The almost clinical language in which these hallucinatory states are described… at the same time holds a subterranean current… the idea that there is, despite all, a space of purity, or in any case incorruptibility, of the human soul. It’s this delicate seed that the demon aims to suppress, to annihilate, to reduce utterly to ashes. And that, yet, is omnipresent.”
— Nikola Delescluse
Mutilation Song reviewed in L’Humanité
“Dinn’s powers are immense, and when he enumerates them in the ear of Thomas, his ‘apprentice demon’, the most blasé of readers cannot repress a shiver… Jason Hrivnak, who, with The Plight House, made a masterful entry into the literature of malaise, now gives us this new Song added to hell, this poetical call to damnation.”
— Alain Nicolas
First online reviews for French edition of Mutilation Song
“A new trap, this is what Jason Hrivnak proposes in Mutilation Song… A fabulous nightmare of hypnotic logorrhea, strewn with visions worthy of a Clive Barker on acid.”
— Nicolas Winter
“Dazzling and suffocating, this violent plunge into the demonism of schizophrenia opens an entire world-in-a-book, a labyrinth of shifting voices, of truths to be deciphered… A truly great novel.”
“Profoundly disturbing and resolutely magnificent.”
— Hugues Robert
Mutilation Song on B&N’s best horror of 2018
“The demon’s harsh and horrifying lectures… create a curious portrait of the struggle against the sorts of internal forces (depression, anxiety) that would like nothing more than to snap their bearers in half… A pretty brutal experience—and one of the most psychologically disturbing and effective horror novels of the year.”
— Sam Reader
French and Québécois online reviews, part four
“The succession of tests unwinds with clinical frigidity, which contrasts with their content and gives the impression of participating in a game, the stakes of which, however, surpass the dimension of simple play… La Maison des Épreuves is in reality a cry of love and despair, that extracts a sickly beauty from childhood anguishes in order to attempt to exorcise them, a guide for navigation between life and death, a set of directions for tolerating the pain of existence.”
— Ingannmic, “La maison des epreuves — Jason Hrivnak”
MCR: “A book that blew your mind?”
DC: “La Maison des Épreuves by Jason Hrivnak. A nightmarish book recently published by Éditions de l’Ogre, a cross between a survival manual and a kind of search for redemption. It’s the “literary UFO” of the current publishing season.”
— David Cantin, interviewed by Marie-Claude Rioux
“I didn’t expect to find such content and it’s a delight! We have the possibility of participating in the novel, what happiness. I’m astonished to have found what I was able to read into it. The same reflections and choices are waiting for you.”
— Laétitia, “La maison des épreuves”
“Jason Hrivnak’s book, La Maison des Épreuves, is one of those collections of stories that open a door hidden in the shadow of our imagination. The door that we avoid, on pain of feeling the heart beat too fast… Book of sorrow and consolation, La Maison des Épreuves, as its name indicates, is meant to test, to show, and to illuminate at the same time that it plunges us into the abyss.”
— “La Maison des Epreuves – Jason Hrivnak”