[In Les Enfants du Sabbat we] encounter the archetypal Quebec literary experience; a precocious adolescent becomes the battleground between the commands of the spirit and the desires of the flesh. Les Enfants du sabbat seems to be a logical development of Anne Hébert's earlier novels, Les Chambres de bois … and Kamouraska…. The fable-like, implicitly incestuous world of Les Chambres de bois and the romantic, implicitly demonic northern landscape of Kamouraska develop into a much more explicit, earthy, "experienced" version of incest, mortification and sacrifice in this tale of the devil's struggle for the soul of the heroine, Julie. This "enfant du sabbat" is in the line of Hébert heroines who struggle between the strictures of a repressive, closed and macabre tradition and the promise of liberation through violent defiance. Anne Hébert, in this novel, pulls away the veils of an impotent religion and the hypocrisy...