The Bloody Dolls

A man with a deformed body spies on his neighbor and experiences his love through coins detached from a mannequin; a surgeon, husband of the spied-on woman, breathes life into the inanimate and created from scratch a new man; an ageless being changes skin, literally; a woman reshapes her physique to resemble a self-portrait that she had drawn as a child; here are some of the characters which can be found in The Bloody Dolls, a stunning choral tale to the polyphonic narration. Launched into a slightly crazy crisscrossing, the different protagonists, each time attached to each other by a bond strong and tense, evolve in an openly fantastic atmosphere and with a scent a bit retro, which seems to evoke the Grand Guignol, Frankenstein as well as the surrealists. A fast-paced story very loosely inspired by Gaston Leroux, reflection on creation and the power of art, Les Poupées Bloody plays with the reader and brilliantly explores this thin fringe which separates fantasy from reality, and the world from its transcription. Benoît Preteseille is the author of, among other books, L'Art et le sang and Mardi Gras (Cornelius) and a noted biography of Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp Marcel hardware store (Atrabile). He is also the co-founder of Warum publishing, which he has since left, and the mastermind behind Ion Editions.