UA killing has just taken place in a chalet, leaving as the only witness a woman unable to remember anything. We know, from the first page, that we won’t know anything before the last… We also know that to move forward, we’ll have to hold firmly to the thread of four labyrinthine stories.
The first, that of a journalist from Rouen, Lysine, who, in a post office box to which she had never subscribed, discovered a kraft envelope bearing her name. Inside, an amateur film in 8 mm. A snuff movie : a trash bacchanalia and the killing of a young girl by men wearing pig masks.
Then comes a psychiatrist, Véra Clertone, who is what is called HES, that is to say hyperelectrosensitive. Like so many other “castaways of the waves”, she does not tolerate microwaves linked to wi-fi, nor those of mobile phones. Vera’s only hope for peace: settling in one of the rare “electromagnetic deserts” that France still has. And that she finds in a hamlet on the borders of the Vosges.
The third woman, Sophie, is a novelist who, instead of drawing inspiration from various facts, sees her fictions become true. At least she believes so, or tries to persuade Vera, her shrink, who had diagnosed her as a “paranoid schizophrenic” four years earlier.
The fourth woman, Julie, knows the least enviable fate of the series. Her painful awakening in a car trunk is only the prelude to a long sequestration in a bunker set up by a man she thought she knew. The novelist Caleb Traskman is old enough to be her father, but his talent and his fame have flattered her for a time, then plunged into a troubled relationship. When Julie wanted to run away from him, Traskman tightened his claws on his prey.
Make fake memories. And regular readers of Franck Thilliez will remember that it was this same Caleb Traskman who was the author of Unfinished manuscript (2018), the first part of the triptych that closes this ambitious and tortuous Mazes. Traskman, again, which reappeared in Twice Upon a Time (2020), the second part, in which we witness the kidnapping of this same Julie, without knowing what happened to her…
Three thrillers that can be read separately but are also skilfully embedded to explore the dysfunctions of the brain – the Thilliezian tropism, here in particular the production of false memories. A triptych haunted by the figure of the novelist Traskman, author of thrillers, sadist and criminal, whose “obsessions with human darkness” reflect, by its own admission, those of its creator, Franck Thilliez. He who recognizes “take a guilty pleasure in digging into these subjects” nevertheless differs from his creature in that he has no “no need to act”. “We all have a dark side that we bring out in one way or another, he adds. For me, it’s through writing. I can kill absolutely anyone I want in fiction. »
A writer who “assumes to participate in voyeurism”, to this part “transgressive” a taste for violence, which claims to convey it through fiction, cannot be… bad? To be seen during Facebook Live, of which he will be the exceptional guest, on June 23.
“Labyrinths”, by Franck Thilliez (Fleuve, 380 p., €21.90).
“The Pleasure of Fear” (Le Robert/Fleuve, coll. “Secrets of writing”, 170 p., €14.90).
In the pocket : « 1991. Sharko’s First Investigation » (Pocket, 544 pages, €8.50).
JULIEN FAURE FOR “THE POINT”