The haunting story of the Hervé family – cursed by a genetic fluke that causes them to become either giants or “runts” – provides the impetus for a compelling first novel by Montréal author D.Y. Béchard.

Vandal Love traces two branches of the family, both giant and runt, in a quest for belonging from the 1960s to the present day. The story is filled with pathos, but pulls no punches in its treatment of the violence that forms a backdrop to the story. The brutality of both families’ harsh lifestyle in rural Québec is paralleled in the vicious and exploitive events they encounter when some of them search throughout North America for a new, less painful place in the world. Needless to say, this place is never found, and the legacy of suffering continues.

Ironically, for those who leave it is the existence of love in their new world, contrasted with the hatefulness of their former lives, that causes even greater anguish. So while the rawness of the novel is at times difficult to experience, the reader is left with a surprising flicker of hope: the search for love, meaning, and belonging is indescribably painful, but it is somehow worth it in the end.

Béchard’s language is poetic and imaginative, and while the style sometimes slows the story down, the novel ultimately satisfies. The novel beautifully evokes that eternal theme of the outsider, the outcast, the freak, in the search to find a place, albeit more of the soul than of the corporeal, that can be called home.