Though she’s written only two novels, Clémence Michallon has already made a distinct impression with characters who exist on a different plane from the rest of us. There are good reasons for their sense of separateness. In her breakthrough debut, The Quiet Tenant, a young woman was held captive by a disturbed man for five years, making her isolation quite literal. In her latest, Our Last Resort, another woman, Frida Nilsen, spent her childhood cut off from society in a cult, along with her brother of choice Gabriel Miller, with whom she shares a fierce bond. (Biological relationships are blurred.)
Cults have recently provided writers such as Lisa Jewell and Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) with rich material. The Family Upstairs, Jewell’s book about a degraded aristocratic English family that falls prey to a controlling con artist, deals with the ways trauma has shaped those who have escaped, while Galbraith’s The Running Grave drops us directly into the middle of a high-functioning cult, painting a harrowing picture of how the trauma is inflicted.
