Reviewed by: Essais cliniques aux laboratoires Donadieu par Louis-Philippe Hébert Eilene Hoft-March Hébert, Louis-Philippe. Essais cliniques aux laboratoires Donadieu. Lévesque, 2020. ISBN 978-2-89763-092-8. Pp. 226. In six short stories, Hébert's mordant humor tempers a composite portrait of humanity as existing somewhere between an indiscernible reality and the fantasies of our own making. In the first story, a young man volunteers for the clinical trials of Antifobix, an anti-fear vaccine. Over time, he becomes inured to images of unspeakable violence but ultimately experiences swings from paranoia to fearlessness about his own mundane reality. Hébert also gets in some jabs at Big Pharma, as the drug company "fabrique le problème et vend la solution" (20). A second story follows a Japanese boy who develops destructive urges from a tender age. His fixation on metal devolves into delusions of metallization and eventually fantasies of self-immolation in the Fukushima meltdown. In a slightly lighter vein, a third character, an overweight airline employee, checks luggage for banned food products. Her over-sized proportions—possibly related to the consumption of contraband—render her invisible to the public she serves. Eventually, she becomes immobilized in an airport basement where she compensates for her losses with fantasies of seduction of travelers. Continuing this theme of self-delusion, a fourth character convinces himself—at his own peril—of the reversibility of aging following a trip to the optometrist for a prescription for less strong glasses. The penultimate story offers a surreal road trip (in a vintage Cadillac Eldorado) from Montréal to Providence, RI to research the work of H.P. Lovecraft, American author of tales of the bizarre. The narrator and his friend Mortimer, barely recovered from a near-fatal bike accident, make a Kafkaesque circuit in Providence, attempting interaction with a citizenry that is either unresponsive or hostile to them and wandering from one dead end to the next. The final story, "Le virus de la fatigue," about a pandemic of sleeping sickness, has eerie resonances with the (current) Covid-19 crisis. It relates unpredictable outbreaks of the disease, supermarkets depleted in panic, abandoned streets, and a paralyzed economy. To be sure, Hébert's tale has moments of grim humor: for example, the sleep-stricken [End Page 267] accumulate in such unlikely places as doorways, tables, sidewalks, and parks. But there is also the recognition of how little it takes to break apart human community. Despite the collection's variety, the stories share aspects of a common reality: Memento drugs resurface in several stories, as do diluvial conditions. Even more consistently: ignorance, distrust, and fear drive behaviors. As entertainingly weird as Hébert's stories are, they make a strong statement about our age of rampant misinformation that strains even the most ordinary and precious of relationships. Eilene Hoft-March Lawrence University (WI) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French