Toulouse. Cédric Sire: “My thrillers tell stories that unfold from the frame”
The Toulouse-based thriller author Cédric Sire recently published his tenth thriller, the reading of which was spellbinding until the last page… Meeting with a smile and without weapons!
Recently the Cinémathèque de Toulouse invited you for a carte blanche, you proposed the films “Hellraiser” and “Lost Highway”, why did the works of David Lynch and Clive Barker have such an impact on you?
A David Lynch film is as much contemporary art as it is cinema, and therefore music. It is a complete installation. As for Clive Barker, he is very important to me because he taught me to write. As a teenager, his work and this film in particular had really become an obsession for me. He made me realize that we had the right to express ourselves, to create, to get out of boxes. And the Extrême Cinéma festival to which the Cinémathèque de Toulouse had invited me, somewhere, that’s it too, that’s why it’s extraordinary. It sometimes allows the public to be shown offbeat, extreme works in complete freedom. This openness to somewhat extreme, exalted, experimental parts of art seems essential to me, especially in today’s world where everything is going wrong, where we are in boxes, where we all try to stand up against each other others on social networks with polls while there is freedom.
It is also the freedom of writing that characterizes your books, what about your latest novel “La Saignée”?
It’s a novel that I wrote to tackle the hidden side of the Internet, on the one hand to evoke torture sites on the dark web (hidden or clandestine web that references sites that are not indexed or accessible only by browsers special, editor’s note) and put them in parallel with the hidden face of the human soul, with what we keep for ourselves, with our unavowable desires. And it’s a novel about violence, about not finding your place in society. It’s quite feminist with lots of quotes because it’s also a novel in which a woman who behaves like a guy — that’s why she can’t find her place in a totally misogynistic society — constantly bumps into big bastards for whom she has to work, she has more and more a problem of conscience and her violent impulses are exacerbated. It’s a novel in which I created a heroine, a main character that I wanted to see assessed, that I wanted to break down to see how she was going to react, when she was going to crack. But that being said, it’s still fun.
How would you define your writing, your literature?
I actually write popular literature. My sole but it is to entertain the reader without any other pretension. And that’s very important to me, I repeat it all the time because often when we talk about literature, the impression is that the authors have very developed egos. I do entertainment. I’m happy when the reader doesn’t realize he’s turning the pages, eating the book and missing his subway or bus stop, that’s the best reward! (laughs) And when he has nightmares because of scenes I made up that are strong enough to stay in his brain, that’s it! It is without any other claim beyond that!
Despite everything, reading immerses you in chilling universes…
Most of my books are slashers (works featuring a psychopathic killer, sometimes disguised or masked armed with a bladed weapon) popularized by Robert Bloch’s novel “Psychosis” adapted by Hitchcock in 1960 and which is in the collective unconscious now, or giallos (name given in Italy to designate the thriller, editor’s note) like the works of Dario Argento or Mario Bava. In “La Saignée” on a killer who kills with gloves, bladed weapons, there is doubt until the end about the identity of the killer. And there we are really in giallo, in the rules of the art, with all the codes that come directly from the cinema. As an author, I’m classified in the thriller/thriller category but, in reality, my sub-inspirations are really scary stories, so genre films, and mainly great films that transcend genres, media, and which actually allow you to go beyond the frame.