The Official Website of Jason Hrivnak
“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
“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”
Tara Lennart of BooKalicious (“le booktube de la littérature indépendante”) has posted a video review of La maison des épreuves on her Booktube channel. An audio file of Tara reading the novel’s opening passage is also available on SoundCloud.
“It’s therefore a novel about the saving power of the imagination… an imagination that constitutes an abyss into which you must throw yourself in order to survive… Every paragraph is like the pitch for a tale that Kafka or Burroughs could have written, a dream forever mutating into nightmare.”
— Pierre, “Dans le style du napalm”
“La maison des épreuves is a book that obliges readers to leave their passivity, a sometimes disturbing book with a complicated construction. That being said, Jason Hrivnak’s first novel has something obsessive about it… One musn’t just read La maison des épreuves, one must take total possession of it.
— Anaïs Orieul, “10 livres à lire absolument en attendant le printemps”
“We’re plunged without cease into situations that are unsound, discomfiting, designed, we understand in the end, to put a name to pain, to put a name to that which should not be… Expect to have plenty of dreams at night in which Hrivnak’s words rock you to sleep…”
— Elizabeth Lord, “La Maison des épreuves de Jason Hrivnak: un beau cauchemar”
“La maison des épreuves is a book of the dead for the use of the living, the gaze of Orpheus toward a suicidal Eurydice… A masterpiece of literary game-craft.”
— Lucien Raphmaj, “Et Fiona avec vous au labyrinthe descendue…”
“Labyrinth, monument, Pandora’s box… La Maison des Épreuves, Jason Hrivnak’s first novel… is, beneath its somber and depressed appearance, a beautiful response to the death drive and a stimulating ode to existence.”
— Eric Darsan, “La Maison des Épreuves, Jason Hrivnak”
“La Maison des Épreuves never ceases to surprise, accumulating puzzles, incantations and scenes of remarkable visual power, its gaze as much upon Poe, Burton and Lovecraft as upon the grammar of the most twisted horror films.”
— Cyril Tavan, “La Maison des Épreuves de Jason Hrivnak”
“Translated by Claro, La Maison des Épreuves is an astonishing, disconcerting book in which the passion for death and failure appear much stronger and more singular than the search for happiness, as if consolation could only be derived from the products of sorrow.”
— Fabien Ribery, “Debout, au milieu du désastre”
“La Maison des Épreuves is a literary curiosity… We exit intrigued and at the same time marked by this difficult and fascinating reading experience, perplexed by our own feelings, as at the end of a disturbing and absurd dream.”
— Anne, “La Maison des Épreuves de Jason Hrivnak”
“A text that will haunt you like your own nightmares… A gothic tale, chilling in its treatment of the anguish and suffering that sublimate the beauty of our darkness.”
— Élodie, Gibert Joseph Barbès (Paris)
“Lovers of sick books, pounce on La Maison des Épreuves. Massive shock!
— Librairie Mollat (Bordeaux)
“This coming-of-age-gothic-multiple-choice-meta-survival-game (you can breathe now) is a UFO in this January’s literary releases. Once immersed in this book you will find yourself an integral part of it, a spectator/actor and not a voyeur. A shocking novel that pulsates and absorbs you… literally. ‘It is aliiiive!’”
— Roxane, La Librairie du Tramway (Lyon)
“Horror is pitiless domain because we evaluate it solely on the basis of its visceral effect: the work either moves us or it doesn’t. Only pornography is more honest than that.”
— Jason Hrivnak
“The narrative of this work is completely original, it made me think of “books in which you yourself are the hero”, but where that hero has been led astray into a labyrinth of possible worlds, of stories from the mind of a malefic Borges… This book is absolutely an experience to be lived.”
— Aurélie Janssens, Page et Plume (Limoges)
“At once a manual for surviving in a hostile world, a role-playing game for twisted misanthropes, a eulogy for a lost time, and a search for redemption: a novel from beyond the pale that truly has everything required to become a cult book.”
— Pierre Barrault, Librairie La Belle Lurette (Paris)
“You finish this book the way you open your eyes at the end of an agitated sleep: a little dazed and troubled, with the certainty of having read a strange and poignant work that is just as inventive as it is destabilizing.”
— Philippe Guazzo, Le Comptoir des Mots (Paris)
“Poetic, staggering, transgressive, electrifying. A vibrant book that will not leave you unscathed.”
— Céline, Librairie Prado Paradis (Marseille)
“It is a book that opens paths, that deploys a range of imaginings crafted with very great virtuosity. And which, at the same time, has this power, a kind of harrowing intimate resonance, the experience of which you have no choice but to accept.”
— NIKOLA DELESCLUSE, Paludes radio show
“La Maison des Épreuves cuts a torturous path in a form that is new, surprising, destabilizing… The game is dangerous: we leave it troubled — or rather, awakened… It is one of the most poetic and striking publications (from Éditions de l’Ogre) and must be read at any cost.”
— LOU DARSAN, Lou et les feuilles volantes
Lou et les feuilles volantes >
“Jason Hrivnak proves that there can be rightness in the extreme, tenderness in the darkness of the soul, and beauty in horror… La Maison des Épreuves is at once a work of magic and a tour de force.”
— HÉLOÏSE, Un Dernier Livre Avant la Fin du Monde
Un Dernier Livre Avant la Fin du Monde >
“This work, beyond the adventurous spirit that seizes us in reading it, is truly an anti-suicide manual and a guide for reenchantment with the world… Personally, if (Hrivnak) is able to repeat such a miracle, staggering in its intelligence and playful subtlety, then I for one would want it, and soon.”
— HUGUES ROBERT, Librairie Charybde (Paris)
“The embryonic narratives formed into black and venomous little tales, recalling those of Edgar Poe… Like all new works, it does not subscribe to a genre but creates one if its own, a form never before seen, a precedent, perhaps, in the history of literature and it therefore seems necessary to me that it exists, that it can be read, even imitated.”
— Alice Zéniter, “Traduire, dit-elle”
“The first ordeal in this House is the act of reading. It presents us with a deforming (or true) mirror that reflects what we are determined not to see. But this atmosphere, which comes from Sade, from Kafka, from the great gothic and surrealist novels, engages us from the very start.”
— Alain Nicolas, “Quel cauchemar êtes-vous?”
“There is something astonishing in La Maison des Épreuves.”
— Mathieu Lindon, “Jeux Pernicieux Inc.”