Thank you to NetGalley and RH for this ARC

This novella is phenomena modern gothic! It's eerie, sinister, multi-layered and immersed in dreadful atmospheric foreboding!
I read this in one sitting and this unsettling tale, is told from the point of view of a child, which in itself is a stroke of genius! The childlike innocence and the ability to have one foot in Nicholas' neurotic imagination leaves you on the edge seat with the sinister tension almost tangible.

I am a huge fan of the novella & this is an outstanding example of the form. Sinister, multi-layered & devastating, this is story that can be read in one sitting (which I highly recommend) & begs to be read again immediately after.

A short book, a novella size reader, that demonstrates the wonderful talent of author Emmanuel Carrère.

Beautifully translated, the writing has pace and depth, suffused with the tension and concerns of a young boy venturing away from home for the first time on an organised skiing trip with his school.
The Class Trip is related just from this 11/12 year old’s interactions, thoughts and experiences.

I identified to Nicholas with his anxieties and alert imagination. He is basically a shy boy others can easily ignore; indeed he would rather stay quiet to avoid embarrassment or becoming the focus of negative attention and bullying.

He has only recently changed schools and has no immediate friends and somehow others believed it would be good for him to go skiing with the school.

His father is very controlling and despite Nicholas’ disadvantages at school insists he drive him to the chalet where they are staying even though this is over 260 miles away. He blames a fear of bus crashes and his work as a travelling salesman as reason for his need to be in that district anyway. The use of dark stories with death and horrifying consequences seem to be used to control Nicholas, exaggerating risk, with a fear of danger outside the home. Whether sharing the school bus or visiting an amusement park. These stories fuel his son’s imagination but prevent him from getting close to his dad.

So nearly a full day has passed by the time Nicholas arrives, relationships and groups formed making him an outsider from the outset. To make matters worse he sees his father drive away only to realise that his well packed bag with all his clothes and special items is still in the boot of the car. The assumption is that as soon as the salesman gets his samples out or his own case when he stops for the night, he will find his son’s bag and drive back to the chalet.

Needless to say neither the bag or his father’s car re-appear. Nicholas’ mum has no means of contacting her husband and no-one initially wants to lend him some pjs.

The book centres of how Nicholas overcomes these setbacks, tries to make friends, fears the worse and becomes fascinated by a real life mystery when a young boy around his age goes missing from a nearby town.

Easy to read and each chapter is a reward in itself building to an engaging story. I thought it captured Nicholas’ adventures with age appropriate thoughts and situations. I identified with him and I believe he is so warmly written everyone will find him a character to empathise with and delight in these dramatic events.

As a new author to me I would like to thank the publisher Vintage for their belief in this writer and commitment to translate his works into English. Having sampled Carrère for myself I do not hesitate to recommend him and I am looking out for other titles in his books.

Four and a half stars.

Nicholas, a young lad at a school skiing trip despite being anxious at not being popular, anxious at not having enough bladder control to survive the fortnight without a personal disaster, and with an over-protective pair of parents, has been delivered by said over-bearing dad, whereas everyone else was in the school bus. However said dad has driven off to do his travelling salesman work with Nicholas' bags, meaning all his pyjamas, toothpaste, and gas station collectors' coupons, are still in the boot. Our lad has survived the first night, but will boy and baggage get reunited soon? Will he survive the entire trip, poised anxiously as he is under the wing of the biggest boy in the school? And how come, even before he's hit the supermarket the following day with ready cash to stock up on essentials, he's had vivid daydreams about a terrorist attack, and two other instances of people dying?

There's a clear and jarring contrast between the innocence of the boy – a little piss-en-lit with no friends and no luggage, at a school skiing vacation where they're stuck practising on grass – with his interior thoughts. His imagined disasters also feature a little too much male-to-male contact, proving his lack of proper fathering. He seems a genuinely disturbed kid, but not in a threatening way – just one with a macabre line of thought. Only, the truth of the matter is something more disturbing yet. This taut little thriller shows the early Carrere (it dates from 1995 originally, and this is a straight reprint of the translation made at the time) could easily be shelved alongside Pascal Garnier, or Frederic Dard, two writers you should both know and love (for to do one is to do the other automatically). All three have a firm grip on conveying a simple, commonplace thread, and showing it unravel in thrillingly gripping manner. I think this, with the complexity of our kid's mind, is a little more character-based than the others, but the darkness of what stands for everyday life in these pages is what we buy any of these writers for. For all the snow that does eventually fall on these young skiers, this is pitch black at times.

An eerie and unsettling tale, packed with atmosphere and a dreadful foreboding. Delivered via the PoV of a child, this cleverly allows us to see things that he doesn't, even while using Nicholas' anxious and increasingly neurotic imagination to ramp up the tension. With sinister things just out of sight, this is a wonderful slice of modern gothic with a distinctive Gallic edge.

Emmanuel Carrère’s Class Trip was first published in French 1995 as La Classe de Neige. This new edition issued by Vintage uses the 1997 English translation by Linda Coverdale.

Although the novella is narrated in the third person, its viewpoint is that of Nicolas, a young boy in the early years of secondary school, who joins his classmates for a fortnight at a skiing resort. Nicolas is not exactly bullied, but it is clear from the first pages that he is considered as an outsider. We soon sense that this is largely the result of his parents’ over-protectiveness. Indeed, his father insists on driving him to the chalet despite its being three hundred miles away, rather than letting him board the bus hired by the school. Nicolas arrives late, already marked as the “weird” one, and is mortified even further when his father leaves with Nicolas’ luggage still in the car boot. Throughout the novel there are other clues that the relationships within his family are not entirely normal.

Nicolas has an over-active imagination, fuelled by his solitude and by his father’s penchant for telling nightmarish stories about kidnapped children and organ theft. For much of the novella he wallows in self-pity. The disappearance of a young boy gives him the opportunity to play the detective and achieve the popularity he craves. It’s hardly a spoiler to state that, in this, Nicolas will be disappointed although I will not state the how or why.

Class Trip has often been described as a horror novella. I’m not sure I agree, but the work does have enough elements in common with the genre to make this classification a reasonable one. Throughout there is a sense of morbidity, a feeling of dread which reaches a climax in the final pages. The work starts off as a coming-of-age novel but soon morphs into something much darker. What is particularly unsettling (and quite Gothic in approach) is that, throughout, the truth seems to be just out of our grasp. There is a constant interplay between fantasy and reality, wakefulness and sleep (or the lack thereof), truth and falsehood. Much is suggested, little is revealed. Class Trip is a chilling, yet understated, read.

This had an interesting idea but I just found the opening section to be a bit awkward and not that appealing to read. The writing wasn't for me but there was promise in this, it just wasn't for me.