A coffee with… Patrick Senécal | From horror to laughter

Why, Patrick Senécal, do you use humor? “Because there is a lack of it in our debates at the moment. If there were more of them, the world would be better,” replies the writer.

Civilized, his new novel, shows the extent of his palette. After the detective and fantasy thriller, he ventures into scathing humor. And since it’s Patrick Senécal, the story turns into horror and it could end badly…

Once again, the book was well received. Our critic Sylvain Sarrazin gives it a score of 8/10^⁠1. But the author doesn’t let success go to his head. “I’m more of a storyteller than a stylist,” he says.

Through this new story, he wanted to explore the mixture of seriousness and bad faith that contaminates the debate.

Laughter comes where you least expect it. For example, in certain opinionated columns. “Sometimes I read that and I say to myself: damn that’s funny! It goes so far…” He targets both the right and the left.

The other does not just express an idea with which we disagree. He becomes a bad person. “However, it should be possible to talk about a subject without attaching one’s ideological grid to it,” he says.

The tone is not angry or desperate. Rather that of a somewhat incredulous observer.

Senécal is aware that he too speaks from a particular point of view. He wanted to avoid the caricature of the aging artist who “panics in the face of the woke” or who “becomes exactly who he swore he would never become when he was 17”.

Faced with these traps, his solution is simple: “spank everyone”. And that, Civilized does it very well.

The first flash of the book came to him when he saw the trailer for the Swedish film Without filter. The luxurious trip of influencers and the ultra-rich on a yacht turns into a nightmare.

He imagined a boat trip that leads 12 volunteers into an obscure social experiment. Among them: a doctor, a policewoman, an agronomist, a student activist, a lawyer, an engineer, a writer and a philosophy teacher. They have nothing in common.

We won’t reveal too much of the plot. Let’s just say this: in this microsociety, the veneer of civilization will eventually crack…

Humor and horror are not so different, Senécal believes. A failed horror scene becomes comical, and humor that doesn’t make you laugh causes discomfort.

Senécal is interested in both, as an author and as a reader. When he taught cinema at the Drummondville CEGEP, he tried to dismantle its mechanisms, with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It showed the scene where a knight is dismembered, one piece at a time. At the end of this process, he continues to challenge his opponent, as if victory were still possible. “A student came to see me. She said: “I understand why you find it funny, but it doesn’t make me laugh .” As much in horror as in humor, you can’t force someone to like it. »

Senécal remembers a particularly violent scene in The void. The bloodiest of his work, he believes. “A reader told me it went so far that he laughed. You have to know how to dose. […] But the most important thing is to maintain internal coherence in the story. Characters must not contradict themselves. »

That was still the goal with Civilized. He also checked with his partner, who is a psychologist and his first proofreader, if a character’s reaction was likely.

Senécal takes on these kinds of challenges well, judging by his impressive career. He already has 23 novels, some translated into several languages ​​– including Polish – and loyal readers.

At this stage of one’s career, the main danger is repetition and boredom. To destabilize himself, once again, he looked elsewhere to see if he was there.

What does not change with the disastrous scientific experiment of Civilized, it’s his taste for invention. Senécal does not talk about himself. He does not aspire to realism. “I have nothing against this genre. It can be excellent. It’s just not me. I’m not capable of it,” he says.

What comes up often, however, is violence. He doesn’t apologize for it. For him, literature does not have to be kind or moral. “I don’t preach morals, but I ask moral questions,” he adds.

“Meanness is part of being human,” he continues. At one time there was the Roman circus or public executions.

“I am interested in this latent violence within us. What does it mean? What do we do with her? »

His book The seven days of retaliation, which became a film, comes to mind. A father tortures his daughter’s murderer there. “He knows it’s wrong, and it doesn’t do him any good, but he can’t stop. That’s a situation that interests me. I don’t want to glorify violence, like the gun fetish in Hollywood cinema. I also don’t want to make a vengeful hero who we love despite his crimes. »

Through his stories, Senécal aims for something else: to confront this violence. Just as he also examines our serious mind, the better to laugh at it.

Even if he is celebrated, he never wanted to achieve consensus. “It’s okay for people to feel abrupt. We can feel offended. But conversely, there is no right not to be offended. »

And we imagine that if an activist distorts his story to attack him, he might, perhaps, with all respect, find it a little funny.

1. Read the review of Civilized by Sylvain Sarrazin

Who is Patrick Senécal?

Born in Drummondville in 1967, he studied French studies at the University of Montreal and then taught for 13 years at the Drummondville CEGEP. In 1994, he released his first novel, 5150, rue des Ormes. But it’s his book On the doorsteppublished by Alire Editions, which made him known in 1998. Since then, he has published nearly twenty novels which have sold more than a million copies, including Aliss (2000), Hell.com (2009) and Flows (2022). He has scripted three films based on his novels as well as the television series Patrick Senécal presents.