Jean-Baptiste Del Amo: "I arrived to sleep with fifteen tarantulas in the room"

BarcelonaA group of five adolescent friends living in a housing development in a small French provincial town decides to enter an abandoned house: the experience will be the starting point of a nightmare that will change their lives. This is the premise that floats on the surface of the plot of La nit devastada, the first novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Toulouse, 1981) that we can read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Oriol Vaqué for Proa. Behind this horror premise lie family conflicts, abuse, and disappointments, but also the discovery of desire and the strength of friendship. After establishing himself before the age of 30 thanks to Una educación libertina (2008) and La sal (2010), both in Spanish published by Cabaret Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo once again focuses on the chiaroscuro of intimacy and social inequalities through a powerful story that pays homage to writers like Stephen King and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven with a powerful, rich, and sensory literary style.

The first thing we read when we open

La nit devastada is a quote from It, by Stephen King, a novel with a supernatural presence that takes refuge in a house, just as we find in your book.

— Stephen King revolutionized the codes of the horror genre. For great masters of horror like H.P. Lovecraft, it was found in hidden places and was almost impossible to describe, or even name. King's proposal goes in another direction: he tells you that horror can be found in those you love most – your mother, your father, your dog – or also in objects we use every day, as is the case with the car in Christine. There is nothing more frightening than a daily threat.

In The Devastated Night you revisit a classic genre trope, the haunted house. At the end of the novel we read that in the housing development where you grew up there was an empty house, where no one lived anymore, and that with your friends you couldn't help but go in.

— It had a special attraction for us. It was one of the first houses in the development, and it had been empty before we were born. We wondered why no one had ever bought it. One night we ended up forcing the lock and going inside. The interior had been stopped in the seventies and it seemed that the family that had lived there had evaporated overnight.

Was it inevitable that the house reappeared in your fiction?

— That house marked my childhood imagination and for years I dreamed of it. Fortunately or unfortunately, it never had the magical force of the novel.

The novel sends us to the mid-nineties, to the time and a similar place where you grew up.

— It could be the place where I grew up, but I think it shares many elements with the housing estates of many other provincial French towns. Housing estates are an interesting and little-exploited literary space in our tradition, which is divided between literature set in Paris and that which takes place in often idealized rural areas.

Suburban developments remind us of the settings in many of Stephen King's novels. Also in films like Halloween, by John Carpenter, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, by Wes Craven.

— Suburban developments seem like spaces of economic and emotional security. At any moment, however, violence and family drama can emerge.

The house is located in the center of the book, as happened in The Son of Man (2021; in Spanish by Seix Barral). It was behind closed doors that the conflicts of The Salt.

— The family is not usually an idealized structure in my novels. It is the place of secrets and dissimulation. It also allows me to talk about society with an intimate gaze. In El hijo del hombre I focused only on a father, a mother, and a son to show, among other issues, the transmission of family violence from one generation to another.

You share a generation with the protagonists of the novel. What would you say characterized it?

— They were years of great singularity. While we lived them, it was said that it was a decade without history: even though there were wars like the one in the Balkans, in France we had the feeling that it was far away from us, and we did not live thinking that anything very relevant could happen the next day. On the other hand, we were children of parents who had lived through May 68: they had been able to dream of another world, a world where there were more sexual freedoms and where women's rights were more recognized, but all our parents, more or less, were trapped by economic reality, and they got married, had children, bought an apartment or a house... We grew up thinking that we had to repeat the same model as our parents. The feeling was one of tranquility, but also of great melancholy. It was as if there was no room for hope of change.

Although France did not live in anticipation of any war, some of the shadows of the time were also important there, as the novel shows. For example, the AIDS epidemic.

— The AIDS drew a disturbing horizon, and during the eighties it was mistakenly labeled as the "gay cancer." The nineties were also the decade of the end of the left and the rise of a more radical right.

The one from the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

— Yes. Its growth benefited, among other reasons, from the increase in unemployment. Everyone was afraid of not finding a job, and parents passed this idea on to us. It was necessary to get placed in a company as soon as possible.

In The Devastated Night, the protagonists will experience very diverse horror situations. The presence that lives there, which feeds on the desires and fears of the group of friends, will learn to get out and will manifest itself in many ways. For example, like a centipede that is a giant replica of the one Thomas has in his room.

— There are many details in the book that are autobiographical. Thomas is called limulid because one day he brings one of these animals to class. In high school, I did biology internships with a teacher who had a great passion for animals and he knew how to pass it on to me. Since then, there is absolutely no animal that scares me or disgusts me.

At the end of the internship, Thomas steals a baby scolopendra and takes it home. Did you do it too?

— What I took home was a baby migale, a species of tarantula.

And you turned it into your pet?

— I had it in the terrarium in my room. I really liked spiders. I ended up sleeping with fifteen tarantulas in the room. The small problem is that there was always one that escaped. My mother went crazy. She told me: "Jean-Baptiste, before going to sleep, check that all the tarantulas are in their place".

In your novel, the monstrous presence of the house is capable of resurrecting loved ones, people you hate, the boy or girl you are in love with... They are almost perfect replicas, but something is wrong. It reminded me of artificial intelligence.

— Up to now, images generated by artificial intelligence have a bit of this effect. There is a distortion, even if sometimes minimal, between what they offer you and reality. It reminds me a bit of those dreams where you open the door of your house and behind it you find the one from the institute.

Is it a recurring dream you have, like the one about the abandoned house?

— From time to time I still dream that I'm back in high school. I have to go because I've lost my baccalaureate diploma and I have to take the exam again. I don't experience it as a nightmare, because in the end, those years helped me shape my personality, but they haven't been key in my life.

I imagine it must have been to publish your first novel, Una educación libertina, at just 27 years old, at Gallimard.

— I sent it to five publishers and Gallimard wrote to me after three weeks to tell me they were interested. Surprisingly, with Una educación libertina I became a finalist for the Goncourt. It all happened very quickly, sometimes I think it didn't really happen to me. I was someone from the periphery, with no contacts in the industry, and until I published my first novel I had been a social worker.