With “Les Chats”, the best-selling author offers us a collection of short stories alternating between thriller, fantasy, dark novel or SF; chilling, grating or disturbing stories.
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Over the course of his successful novels, he has accustomed his readers to large volumes of more than 700 pages. But like many authors, Bernard Minier started writing with short stories, quickly forgotten or hidden at the bottom of a drawer. A literary genre which, with Edgar Poe, Conan Doyle or Hoffmann (and Asimov, Clifford D. Simak and Lovercraft for SF), could only seduce the shy and solitary teenager that was little Bernard in the Pyrenean valley of his childhood. “What makes it so that at this age, words penetrate us with a force, a reverberation that they will never completely regain later? What is it that in those times, our young minds perceived with the sensitivity of a high-precision instrument the slightest suspicion of strangeness emanating from a story, immediately putting our nerves on edge and our senses on edge? on the lookout?” he asks in the preface to his latest work Catssubtitled Fourteen mysterious, evil and cruel stories.
A collection of short stories, therefore (some very recent, others written well before the publication of his first novel), Ice, in 2011) alternating between thriller, fantasy, black novel, SF or mystery; in which the author likes to mix “the thrill and the intimate, the fear and the grotesque, the bizarre and the monstrous”. Without ever announcing – and this is one of the great successes of the work – into what genre it is leading us astray. Here, is the heroine in the grip of madness or pursued by a real killer? There, is the narrator dead or is he dreaming of his death? With what final pirouette will this ultimate news conclude? Are we in and shout, a Sherlock Holmes investigation or in Tales from the Crypt ?
Chilling, grating or disturbing stories
We thus follow two couples of cynical tourists who are fans of “dark travels”, these trips organized to cursed places (Chernobyl, Rwanda or the places of torture of the Argentine dictatorship); with an old Spanish doctor, we discover the secrets of the “colony” where silent German residents have been hiding since the end of the war (the story takes place in 1978, at the end of Francoism); then comes the astonishing short story competition organized by an eccentric scholar who receives two identical texts – except for one word! – written by two authors who swear they do not know each other; a checkpoint in the middle of the desert during the Gulf War; the night of this forensic doctor alone faced with a strange corpse, or that of this talk show host contacted by a serial killer who wants to appear on his show… So many chilling, grating or disturbing stories. Related to current events or out of nowhere.
Finally, we will focus on Cats, short story which gave its title to the work, a little gem that Edgar Poe or Guy de Maupassant would not have denied, and which, presented in the form of a correspondence (the action takes place in Scotland during the Second World War), takes us step by step from reality towards an endless dream.
