We are immortal, by Pierre Darkanian: in the heart of darkness

The prologue of Pierre Darkanian’s second novel promises us “strange things” because it exists “very much alive among us, spirits, witches, ghosts, that time is a view of the mind, that the eras respond to each other, that the future acts on the past as much as the reverse”. This warning must be taken literally. The story begins in 2026 in the Goutte d’Or district, “this eternal suburb”where Janis Meyer, a young artist on the fringes, is looking for her mother, Jeanne, who has been missing for four months.

Before disappearing, she had just published Medea’s Afflictiona book based on her twenty years of correspondence with Carol Schäffer, sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for child sacrifices perpetrated in the late 1970s, within the sectarian community she led. While the work meets with an unexpected response, curious phenomena occur at the Goutte d’Or, including a spectacular increase in…