Dantec's Inferno

Dark and dire is the universe of the contemporary French neo-polar and science-fiction writer Maurice G. Dantec. Author of a number of large, sprawling novels, plus some short stories, interviews, and (for lack of a better term) rants, Dantec has situated himself as a singular figure on the French literary scene. And this has occurred in spite of the fact that he is precisely not on the French literary scene, having emigrated to Canada in protest (at least in part) against the European lack of commitment during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Writing from what is admittedly a rightist, Christian perspective, Dantec produces a world of horror in which evil lies just under the surface, when it is not in plain sight. From La Sirène rouge [The Red Siren] (1993) through Villa Vortex (2003), Dantec wrote four black and bleak novels in which he traces an increasingly apocalyptic vision of the contemporary world as well as that of a somewhat futuristic, but not at all far-fetched, universe, and his more recent work has continued in the same vein.