You Will Love What You Have Killed

By Kevin Lambert
Translated by Donald Winkler

“A dying child is not enough to attract attention in Chicoutimi. My hometown was murderous.” Kevin Lambert’s You Will Love What You Have Killed is the story of a town doomed to curses, unexpected violence, and cruel accidents. In his little Canadian borough of Chicoutimi, childhood is a series of dangerous interactions that never end, even after death. The story is told from the perspective of a narrator who is both dead and alive, both young man and child, both keeper of secrets and destroyer of privacy. The narrator and his friends are ghosts, or fragments of children walking in the bodies of the living. Either way, every page blisters with the rage of the powerless, and every chapter threatens righteous vengeance.

Lambert’s prose is unflinching as the world around Chicoutimi struggles to right itself at the turn of the 21st century. The narrator, Faldistoire, who is “perhaps the first child to return” from death, laments that his town was not destroyed, laid to waste by the same men who took down the Twin Towers on September 11th:

“During the first days of my sixth year in elementary school, I already know that it is neither evil nor good that makes the earth tremble and drives fanatics to throw themselves onto the flames.”

The death of a toddler through the negligence of his father (who has killed a child before) on the same day is overshadowed by New York’s headlines and the subsequent fear that envelops North America.

Though there is an otherworldliness to the town—witches, ghosts, and curses abound—it busies itself with everyday matters like keeping the streets free of snow, attending to the needs of schoolchildren, and keeping secret the identities of school-age dancers at the local strip club. Popular culture penetrates the town’s thin walls, and Faldistoire and his friends communicate through Leonard Cohen lyrics, Tomb Raider hairstyles, and Jean Genet novels. If Kevin Lambert hasn’t written himself into these stories (apart from the character named Kevin Lambert), he’s constructed a role at the center of this novel whose heart beats with the same power as an autofictional hero.

There’s a lot here for the queer reader who came of age in the late ’90s and early aughts, before the provinces were forced to acknowledge legal marriages of same-sex couples, before television realized LGBTQIA representation could be lucrative, before the advent of a cocktail that could slow the progression of HIV. Living in a world in which Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was the prevailing hetero-progressive stance was a daily exercise of personal betrayal. Because they are forbidden to be themselves, to pursue their natural lives, the children who refuse to betray their own desires are as powerful as the adults—even more powerful in death than they are in life.

Because they are forbidden to be themselves, to pursue their natural lives, the children who refuse to betray their own desires are as powerful as the adults—even more powerful in death than they are in life.

Though the narrator understands his sexuality long before he finds any sort of acceptance or love, he wanders a town that vilifies transgender women and gay men, all the while pretending that they also don’t exist:

“My mother confiscated the only known photo of Paule, post-operation, before sitting down to tell me this horror story, that’s what she said, this whole business was a horror story, Aunt Angèle wouldn’t want to know that you’ve been going through her photos, she’s trying very hard to forget all the bad times she’s been through.”

That double-consciousness—being something that people in power are actively trying to prove nonexistent—permeates this book and drives the anger that brings about the most violent act in the story. We know it’s coming—there’s a promise on every page—so the ending of the book is no twist, no surprise. We’ve been conditioned to understand that the only way the kids in the book can take ownership over their experiences is through violence, and when death is no longer a threat, ownership is inevitable.