CRITIQUE – The best-selling author rediscovers the fever of his beginnings with fifteen stories, forcing him to be concise and strikingly dark.
It's a neglected genre. Are French authors afraid of the news? Afraid to move from one plot to another, from a different protagonist each time, to captivate their readers in just a few pages? Bernard Minier could have hesitated: embarking on such an adventure is a challenge. But the pleasure he takes in it, and it is palpable, must have put an end to his doubts. How right he was!
If we find his universe in these fifteen stories, their brevity forces him to be concise and their darkness is all the more striking. In his preface, he explains his choice, the pleasure felt at the idea of rediscovering the fever of the beginnings when, before becoming a best-selling author, he wrote short stories, and that, perhaps even more intense, of imagine your readers savoring them in a more or less short period of time. Because while some of these stories only have a few pages, others are much longer.
Also read
Lucia, by Bernard Minier: monster hunt from Salamanca to Segovia
“The news, my dear, does not tolerate approximation”he makes one of his characters say. This sentence, of course, he made it his own. No approximation, for example, in the very first story which, if it were necessary, suddenly brings us out of our torpor. Two couples have a strange obsession, to do « dark tourism ». That is, visit the countries where terror reigned: Chernobyl, the ghost town, or Argentina to retrace the steps of the 30,000 who disappeared during the dictatorship, haunt the places of torture, meet a repentant torturer… A hell of a program! Human nature is surprising, cruel, thirsty for the morbid, Bernard Minier contemplates it, sometimes ironic and often heartbroken, in this chilling adventure and then in the following ones.
Each story has its own tone, sometimes dark, sometimes funny, sometimes precious, its protagonists, victims or executioners, its settings, at first peaceful and quickly anxiety-provoking. We never know where or what the short story writer has planned to take us into and that's all the better. Who are these adorable children abused by their foster families? Why does this young English girl straight out of a gothic novel feel more and more anxious? And should this famous host really agree to meet the Equinox Killer, a bloodthirsty serial killer?
Memorable fall
Between thriller, science fiction, fantasy, anticipation, horror is never far away but Bernard Minier takes pity on us: he lets us breathe. So, sometimes, this lovely reverie written during confinement, when wild animals (bearing the names of philosophers!) regain possession of their territory, finding for a while the silence, the smells, “a spring without men” – finally, no longer a single polluter to spoil simple pleasures.
But no successful news story without a memorable fall. Bernard Minier understood this well. So we are most often picked at the very last moment. Foolproof efficiency. And confirmation that the writer definitely has imagination to spare.
