French Literature Reviews - 2026
É. Pessan, Removing the Masks
Other Literary Studies
Bibliographic reference: PESSAN, Eric. Ôter les masques, Nouvelles Éditions Cécile Defaut, collection "Le Livre / La Vie", edited by Isabelle Grell, 2012.
The sixth volume in the Le Livre / La Vie series could only revolve around something diabolical. Eric Pessan spent a year living alongside the protagonists of The Shining. The fruit of this cohabitation will be published in late August 2012.
Preface to REMOVING THE MASKS, ERIC PESSAN, based on THE SHINING by Stephen King, Nouvelles Editions Cécile Defaut, coll. Le Livre La Vie edited by Isabelle Grell
"I don't think your visions can hurt you... any more than pictures in a book... If you close your eyes, they'll go away."
It is far from certain that Dick Hallorann is right.
Like Sartre, Pessan finds in the books he opened as a kid the scent of a world's decomposition. He read nothing but science fiction—Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov—because reading meant escaping. Like Maupassant, a Horla was already, in his childhood, stealing his image of the world—invisible, just a few steps away, overwhelming him with its heavy presence. Like Stephen King, ghosts besiege his memory, giving birth to specters, reviving instinctual, visceral fears rather than merely childish ones.
After overcoming some hesitation regarding the author who had influenced him the most, fearing that Stephen King might not measure up to a "true classic" in the league of Camus, Jules Verne, and others, Éric chose to cast aside intellectual propriety and spend a year living with Jack Torrance, Wendy, Danny, the Overlook, the explosive boiler, and the other "actors" of The Shining. Right from the start, he set himself a constraint: to transform what happens in room 217 into two hundred and seventeen evocations of the terror of (sur)viving. For, as he has known ever since he was himself watched by a ghost one night in Passage Bardos, we are all merely survivors, and our ghosts—even if some of us manage to keep them under control better than others—are just waiting to be let out of Pandora's box. Éric Pessan, who until now (2011–12) had managed to hide it from himself (and others), became a writer precisely out of dread at the approach of his ghosts. They are manifold. They consume him from every side. They swarm within him just as words overabound in his head. They do not exist, he knows that. But they return. Fear returns. Anxiety. Heavy. Oppressive.
Éric Pessan wanted to become a writer at the age of 15 in order to become Stephen King. At forty, after unsuccessfully trying to imprison his ghosts on paper in 2005 in his very own Overlook—a magnificent 18th-century château where he was in residence to write—he observes them in turn. He discovers the nakedness of their internal organs, the extreme destitution of their lives, just as Danny sees the decomposed suicidal old woman in her bathtub rise up, pursue him, and force him to look into her glazed, burst eyes, never where she is expected. Danny had opened room 217; opening a door is simple. And you will enter this book just as Danny entered the room. You have cracked the cover. The pale, new, slightly swollen pages are covered with fine black veins that drink the ink and smell of the formaldehyde of a never-ending past that survives in a parallel temporality. In Ôter les masques, Pessan draws us into his room, into his parallel, approximate, elusive world.
His writing belongs to that strain described as coming from the outside, the excluded, the out-there. That Horla which makes you feel you are the object of something dangerous lurking within you. Which is the genesis of imagination. Writing is supernatural because writing makes you immortal. Writing is the almost-real. The double. The other. Overwhelming.
Living for a year with this peculiar work by Stephen King—where the father never gets past his incipit and loses his mind over it, where ghosts rub up against you indecently to give you an erection or wrap their bony hands around your neck to detach it from your torso—spending a year with the original version of The Shining tucked in his briefcase leaves its marks. Éric Pessan already knew that books have a memory. He now knows that ghosts do not.
Éric Pessan will not wait for the masks to fall. He will tear them off you.
Isabelle Grell
The text positions Eric Pessan’s work within a tradition of literature that engages with the supernatural and the psychological impact of childhood reading. By examining his personal history with science fiction and horror, the author situates his writing process as a response to the visceral fears and ghosts that have shaped his creative life. The book addresses the intersection of memory, anxiety, and the act of writing, framing the author's year-long immersion in the world of The Shining as a confrontation with the specters that drive his own literary output and imagination.
Pessan’s approach involves a structural constraint, organizing his reflections into 217 distinct pieces that mirror the significance of room 217 in King’s narrative. The work examines the nature of terror and survival, drawing parallels between the author’s experiences and the characters of the Overlook Hotel. By exploring themes of decomposition, the uncanny, and the influence of past literary encounters, the book investigates the boundary between reality and the supernatural. Readers interested in the relationship between genre fiction and personal creative development may find this exploration of the writing process and its haunting origins relevant.