The Official Website of Jason Hrivnak
“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
“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
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…”