Sphex

In thirty-seven toxic micro-fictions, Bruce Bégout proves to be a specialist in the horror of the everyday, a cold dissector of unsettling oddities. What we can no longer see and feel, yet which maximally defines and overshadows us, becomes the protagonist of the narrative within just a few sentences and casually tips the world over in three or four pages. Against the backdrop of post-industrial non-places—commercial areas, nursing homes, highways, furniture stores, construction sites, and the soul landscapes of our time—a profoundly human cast grapples with its entirely contemporary, that is to say: as arbitrary as it is compulsive obsessions. Bégout's "pathological fantasies," on par with those of David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard, are shaped by that "Spleen de Paris" of Charles Baudelaire, which gave figures and scenes to the ennui of the 19th century. In glaring light.