Lait cru

Rights held : World

The North American farm is not picturesque or peaceful. It is haunted by the dead, by ghost stories and family secrets, by stillborn chicks trapped inside their shell. Invisible cattle roam here, worn down by the endless grind of feeding the nation.

Among the shadows, a young boy walks between his shy elder brother and his wild younger brother, on the thin line between the fields and the woods. He eventually crosses the border, entering a strange land where eye floaters, tinnitus, and nightmares rule and where his fingerprints are lost. His body frozen, his mind ablaze, he finds himself in a psychiatric ward. But even from his hospital bed, he keeps wandering the farm grounds, looking for what is not yet lost.

Lait cru injects a healthy dose of Gothic into the old rural landscape. Appealing to both the senses and the heart, Steve Poutré’s writing unearths skeletons from the fertile soil and demons from the mind. This startling first novel questions the servitude that binds humans and animals together in a twisted and tender way. A glass of raw milk to be drunk in one gulp.