The ten-year-old narrator of André Marois' new novel 10 ans, pas méchant starts by pushing a friend into a thicket of brambles --- "It was very bad, holes like a colander" --- turning him into "a perforated kid." But our narrator, yes, is not really evil, mischievous perhaps, a bit ADHD perhaps, given to perpetrating serial indiscretions and acts of violence. He likes to "get the villain out" as his mother says, so he can calm down. The story is told deadpan, the tone is mordant, black, and insistent.