The black beast that haunts children’s dreams.

Children do not want to sleep. They demand stories to turn back time. A little more, one more page, before the dream they fear takes them away, takes them away and leaves them abandoned to their fate, on the borders of an unknown space. With their eyes closed, they throw themselves into the void. But the terror of falling is followed (who does not remember?) by an ethereal lightness. There they rise, they fly. And if they touch the ground even a little, a simple kick with the heel sends them back to heaven. This joy is, however, very fragile. It only takes a nothing, an unknown breath, a colour, a sudden vision, for the enchantment to turn into a nightmare.

Carole Martinez’s new novel explores children’s dreams. In Sleep your rough sleepadvances in the wasteland of a long and disturbing history where reference points fade away, where reality slips away, where the worst dangers threaten. On which side of the world does this adventure take place? How, with what reflection did it begin?

Eva is a neurologist and sleep specialist. She fled, leaving Paris and her job as a researcher, with Lucie, her 8-year-old daughter. Pierre, her husband, was becoming increasingly violent, especially with the little one. She found refuge in a little house lost in the middle of nowhere, in the Camargue. There, little by little, she regains her calm. She can breathe. There is no one around. Except a distant neighbor, a sort of lonely and brusque man whom they found one day in the reed beds when he had just saved a wild goose wounded by a hunter. Lucie, who since her arrival has lived at the rhythm of nature, learned the names of plants and birds, immediately became fond of the man. Eva, distrustful, would prefer him to stay away. One night, the little girl begins to scream horribly. What black beast passed through her dream? What her mother does not yet know is that, taken “at the speed of the earth’s rotation”The same cry, like a terrible clamor, was launched, together, by all the children of the world.

Entangling the supernatural with secrets

Of sewn hearthis first novel, fawn roses (Gallimard, 2007 and 2020), Carole Martinez continues to entangle the supernatural with secrets, abandonments, problems and dull anguish that sometimes dissipates with astonishing embellishments. In The tilted Earth (Gallimard, 2015), a girl who died on the 14th^my The 19th century still existed in the hazy memories of its old ghost. Here, all of humanity seems to be given over to the specters in a planetary poltergeist. The long, heart-rending cry was a preamble. Carried to a crescendo by the dreams of children, apocalyptic catastrophes occur. The ten plagues of Egypt fall again. We must break the spell. And rise from this terrifying dream.

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