“After the first death…” The emergence of Children of the Night in Laisse-moi entrer (John Lindqvist), Ma chère grand-mère (Catherine Brighton) and La Balafre (Jean-Claude Mourlevat)

In the works of these authors, the shock of the sudden emergence of child-specters challenges the rational order of the world before restoring and subsuming it: Catherine Brighton gives a portrait of a young castaway from the future, John Ajvide Linqvist considers the conditions necessary for the survival of vampires, and Jean-Claude Mourlevat imagines a teenager from the 1990s faced with the ghosts of the Nazi Occupation and the Holocaust. This diverse array of scenographies creates a kind of typogenesis of the “children of horror.”