At 54, Patrick Senécal knows very well that he is no longer the flavor of the month that the media talk about with enthusiasm during the literary season. However, after 28 years of career, the native of Drummondville can pride himself on having retained a loyal readership which impatiently awaits each of his offerings. This fall, its readers risk being somewhat shaken by discovering Resonancesa novel for which the author wanted to move away from his favorite genre.
“I could never have written this novel 20 years ago, confides the novelist, met in the offices of the To have to. I’m stepping out of my comfort zone a bit, but it’s still a thriller, although I didn’t want it to be that much. When I was making my plan, I was really building it like a thriller. So I told myself to stop struggling with it. I’m glad to have found that I’m doing thriller because it lives in me and it’s in my nature. »
May his many admirers be reassured. Several elements specific to Senécal’s novels, when they are not direct nods to his books and his hometown, are found in Resonances. Thus Théodore Moisan, the main character, is a writer living from his pen, one of whose friends, Gilles Vincent, is a literature professor at CEGEP. Moreover, the novelist seems to take pleasure in pointing out that they belong to the privileged class, that of heterosexual Caucasian men in their fifties abused by the movement. woke.
“There was a bit of irony in that, a bit of provocation. What is excellent news is that this movement made me reflect as a writer and forced me to rethink my characters, to ask myself if they are all white and straight, if such a character could not be gay, if the policeman couldn’t be a policewoman. »
drive and repulsion
Whether Resonances is not strictly speaking a horror novel, it is not the blood-curdling scenes nor the disturbing images, like the recurring one of two children whose macabre pantomime evokes the little girls of the shining of Kubrick, which are missing.
“At the time, I didn’t think about it, but there are undoubtedly reminiscences of the film. I rather had in mind the little boy who watches the women boarding the train to Auschwitz and who makes the gesture of slitting his throat in Schindler’s list. »
While Moisan will have the impression of finding himself in groundhog day or a play by Ionesco, after having lived a traumatic experience while undergoing an MRI, the reader will enjoy finding in this universe, where everyone no longer restrains their impulses, references ranging from Pirandello to King, via Carpenter , Nolan and Amenabar.
“I was thinking above all of Calvino, to whom I don’t want to compare myself because he is exceptional, in this kind of meta game that he liked to do, but also of David Lynch. Basically, I wanted to follow the logic of the nightmare, a logic that escapes Moisan, but that everyone around him understands. »
At the origins of this novel, the idea of which germinated when the author of Floods (Alire, 2021) had an MRI — without experiencing any anxiety-provoking moments, he reassures us — there was a desire to explore new territories by staging the doubts of a writer. Behind this perilous challenge, taken up brilliantly, was she hiding the desire to prove to herself that he hadn’t written the same book for years?
“At a certain age, every artist should ask themselves if they are repeating themselves, if they are not a little too slippery, which they could challenge themselves. With the series MalphasI challenged myself with humor (trash). It’s legitimate to do so, especially in the genre that I do, the thriller, the horror ; it’s easy to play with the same recipes, to repeat yourself without realizing it. It’s not for nothing that horror gets a bad press: there are a lot of bad things. And that’s why Resonances was difficult to do, I didn’t want to write just anything. »
dark humanity
Even if it appears there in an almost subliminal way, the pandemic seems to have played a role in the writing of Resonances. As if Patrick Senécal had wanted to express a certain anxiety or exasperation in the face of the slippages we have witnessed since the spring of 2020.
“The pandemic didn’t scare me — I’m not a scary guy — but it confirmed a lot of things I thought about human nature. Resonances talks about what would happen if our urges started going out. I think there are a lot of drives that would be negative, but since I don’t believe everyone is inherently evil, I put some positive drives in there. »
“Right now, my distress, or my fear, comes a little from the kind of opposition that there is between the young woke and the old mononcles, he adds. In the novel, there was no question of taking sides for one or the other because I find that there are slippages on both sides, but obviously, all that is exacerbated and takes on catastrophic proportions. In fact, it seems that communication is impossible, because we are about to attack, so there is no more room for nuance. »
While Théodore Moisan, Gilles Vincent and the Haitian-born novelist Gerda Benjamin, whose book launch allows Senécal to scratch the literary world, launch into theories about the novel and the characters – which the author does not not support it at all — one has to wonder why the former CEGEP literature professor would not offer his readers, in the manner of Stephen King (Writing. Memoirs of a tradeAlbin Michel, 2001), his own reflections on literary creation.
“Of course it would be a great challenge, but here I would be really out of my comfort zone. You have just sown a seed there…” concludes Patrick Senécal. As for a possible adaptation to the big screen or as a TV series of Resonancesthe novelist is open to discussion.