The Accursed gathers two of Seignolle’s first novellas, written between 1945 and 1948. Both of them deal with the intersection between rural life and the supernatural, thus claiming an honorary seat in this aggregate that we tend to name folk horror.

A past consisting of desperately hard work makes stiff digging

As can be deduced from the title, both Accursed novellas deal with young women marked by some sort of sinister contact with the supernatural. In Malvenue, the fate of the heroine with the strange mark on the forehead seems to be intertwined with a very old statue that her father’s plowshare dragged from the earth almost a year before she was born; as the current crop is burnt, the shadow of the tragic and mysterious events that transpired 20 years ago falls upon the present. In Marie the Wolf, the namesake heroine is anointed as a newborn child by a wolf-drover, thus gaining a channel of mostly involuntary interaction with the predator animals.
Both of these stories take place in the French province of Sologne, which is revealed as a rough, swampy rural environment, dotted with forest remnants and small farmhouses which throng into larger communities during the various festivals that mark the wheel of the year. Nature is full of life, omnipotent, relentless and beautiful. Life in rural Sologne isn’t idealized – the hard farm work leaves visible scars on body and soul, and religiosity may create new wounds or cause old ones to fester. However, this idyllic life does manage to charm the reader through its harmonious navigation of the surrounding world, as well as the way it touches and reveals the majestic and full-of-awe aspects of the place – in the same way that the plowshare of the Malvenue protagonist’s father unveils the buried statue.
Both of the novellas’ core plot is seemingly simple, almost fit, one could say, for the Sologne’s idyllic environment, without ever falling into simplicity – a direct efficiency is dominant. However, as the stories slowly unfurl upon a variety of axes (temporal, genealogical, spatial), a complex creation is revealed. The Gothic genre hovers over the pages like one of Sologne’s energetic clouds – its presence is testified by the tragic character of fate, the inter-genealogical trickling of sin and the osmosis of place and characters.

Such a wailing voice that it seemed to be grated on the rough ceiling of the stars

The two stories are full of images of the relationship between folk and the uncanny (we see for instance the healing ritual suggested by a local wizard to the heroine’s father – swallowing a paper with magic symbols written on it), as well as manifestations of the supernatural itself. The climax of the latter is the image of the headless saint that spreads out her shroud-sheets in the nocturnal swamp. Claude Seignolle knows well how folk and supernatural feed into each other. Thus he doesn’t isolate the uncanny, neither does he exhibit it (both of which would render it a harmless curio), but instead he focuses on sharpening its existing aspects.
A frequent motif in folk horror is the use of a protagonist that is a stranger to the setting. That hero turns essentially into a vehicle for the reader (an avatar) who follows a path parallel to said character – the customs, whims and secrets of the place are revealed into two fronts at the same time: the narrative and the real. This technique is undoubtedly helpful. But the need for a medium extends the distance between the reader and the heart of the story: the presented community. As a result, the latter tends to become exoticized and lose part of its realness.
Claude Seignolle selects a different path. The book’s characters are mostly simple farmers, always local and embedded in the landscape, which is ultimately revealed as the real protagonist. The narration is rooted in the two communities where the two stories transpire, and unfurls with almost dizzying jumps from a local person to another, thus composing a seething mosaic of personalities. The place’s secrets gush through their partakers and shine through.

A laugh made up of cutting, calcinating blades

The author’s greatest strength lies in the language used in these two early works, through which he attains a phenomenal depiction of the countryside. The French province comes spectacularly alive through the narration’s deep activity. The writing’s expressiveness is somewhat rough, simple, almost clumsy in places and utterly descriptive, resembling the peasants described; this is corporal writing, in harmony with the experience of these people who live inside the world and not in an imaginary pulpit beyond. The only dissonance lies in the moments when the underlying narrator makes his presence known through prophetic sentences (something that no-one in the story can know at this point) or commentary of actions just described.
The writing’s articulation occasionally evokes a pleasant sense of disharmony. At these moments, it seems to follow an intuitive train of thought which ends up as the subcutaneous exponent of a charming innocence. The language exudes authenticity, not through the obsolete mimicry of parlance, but by embedding nature in writing itself. It’s not only the fresh (and somewhat weird for the modern reader) metaphors which originate in nature and the daily life of the characters, accentuating the reader’s immersion. The landscape itself has a fully active role in the text, emerging from every nook of the narration.

There follow two typical excerpts, one from each novella:

“The sun mounted the sky and beat down like a furnace. Its rays hammered on the Breton's bare head but nothing could put a stop to his growing madness. He was surrounded by life. A flight of larks twittered in the deep of the sky. A cuckoo threw out its changeless notes. From the wood came the crunching of cartwheels. In the distance, the cowbells of the la Noue herd scattered their tinkle on the air. A bonfire of dead grass sent its incense far and wide.”

“They were sitting outside. Some on benches they had brought out, others on the ground which for once wasn't clamouring for something to be done to it. The night and the silence gave the mother the raw materials of mystery that she needed for telling her tale. The night provided the setting that each wanted; the silence took over from the story-teller whenever she paused, and knew better than she did how to keep curiosity at boiling-point.”

Claude Signolle was an unexpected surprise of the biggest caliber. The quality and the enchanting prose of The Accursed’s two stories makes me seek out his other two books that are available in English. Folk horror excellency. ( )