Claude Seignolle – författare

Spurned lovers return from the grave to haunt their partners, ghost ships materialise on the sea, a bird’s eerie cry lures the unsuspecting to their deaths in a marsh… Welcome to the unsettling world of the French weird.From German-inspired gothic tales to chilling contes cruels, the stories in this anthology follow the evolution of uncanny fiction in France from the post-revolutionary turmoil of the early nineteenth century, through World War Two and into the early 2000s. They’re tales influenced by, and often seeking to justify, civil and political unrest, populated by those forced to cope with constant change and rebellion, seeking some solace amongst the chaos.Featuring strange stories from Gallic literary heavyweights Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier and Guy de Maupassant, as well as unsettling tales from voices less well known outside France, such as Nathalie Henneberg, Claude Seignolle and Christine Renard, Danse Macabre is a beguiling concoction of fractured melodies that moves to its own unique rhythm.

Widely regarded as Seignolle’s masterpiece, The Unwelcome take the reader to the rural Sologne region of a hundred years ago, when night was terrifying and a lingering scent of witchcraft was just as acceptable to the people in its hamlets as any modern scientific advances. Against this eerie backdrop, sixteen-year-old Jeanne is out of control – burning hayricks and playing jealous lovers off against each other with terrible consequences – but can she really be blamed for her behaviour when a sense of evil seems to linger around her family like morning mist over the cursed local marsh?The answer lies in a discovery made by her father, Moarc’h, a generation before, when he dug the ceramic head of a pagan statue from a plough furrow and installed it at the family farm. Dreadful things happened then; just as dreadful things are happening now. And as the ghosts of the past both literally and figuratively descend on the descendants of Moarc’h, the horrors that seem to swirl around Jeanne become impossible to ignore.