10 nouvelles fantastiques : De l'Antiquité à nos jours

by Alain Grousset, Various

De Ptine te Jeune à Stephen King, en passant par Edgar Poe ou Guy de Maupassant, on retrouve ce même goût du frisson... Depuis l'Antiquité et jusqu'à aujourd'hui, les hommes aiment se raconter des histoires pour se faire peur. Des histoires de fantômes, de diables, mais aussi de téléphones portables machiavéliques... 10 nouvelles pour trembler et découvrir toutes tes facettes du fantastique...

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published November 3, 2010

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read the entire anthology, just the story by the late Pierre Bordage, which is apparently free to read online. See here or here, for example. There's also an audio version on YouTube.

Pierre Bordage sadly passed away on 26th December 2025. While I've read quite a lot by him, there's more that awaits me and which I'm looking forward to. A story short like this one here can help to read something in-between other books and discover something that was not republished elsewhere.

"Fonds d'écran" is a story from 2005 and shows that Pierre Bordage didn't have to stick to science fiction to write a good short story. The public for this anthology are/were young children, hence also the simpler writing style. In addition, the first link I mentioned has some verbs and expressions explained in proper French.

Anyway, it's about a boy who's bought a new mobile phone with his monthly allowance. Barely 20 EUR, it was a bargain, and he got to keep his older phone as back-up. The phone was produced by a company called ReFNe (enfer mirrored; enfer = hell). And our boy would soon find out why the phone was so cheap, although he primarily used it to show off with his fellow pupils in school and in particular one girl, who didn't really fancy him, though. Each fellow pupil he called with his new phone would mysteriously disappear each time they "facetimed", talked to each other by video. The call would end abruptly, but a photo of their frightened expression would be saved onto his phone, weirdly enough. Police would investigate and know who last was in touch with them.

He too would suddenly be contacted by ReFNe with a specific message to not do anything suspicious with his phone or he would suffer similar consequences. To close off, his ringtone would be changed for a horrific laughing voice.

An accessible and fast-paced story, but even I find it a little scary and would certainly have found it scary if I'd been +/-13 years in 2005. Unlike (and like) many of his other stories, this one was not republished in any of his four short story collections:

* Nouvelle Vie™ (2004) (my review)
* Dernières Nouvelles de la Terre (2010) (my review)
* Hier je vous donnerai de mes nouvelles (2016) (my review)
* Nouvelles Vagues (2025) (my review)

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Previously read by Pierre Bordage, in chronological order: (not counting his stories published in various anthologies since his last collection)
* Chroniques des ombres (my review)
* Hier je vous donnerai de mes nouvelles (my review)
* Le Jour où la guerre s'arrêta (my review)
* Entretiens avec Pierre Bordage (my review)
* Contes des sages d'autres mondes et d'autres temps (my review)
* Contes des sages pas sages (my review)
* Dernières nouvelles de la Terre... (my review)
* Les Dames blanches (my review)
* Nouvelle Vie™ (my review)
* Les Derniers Hommes (my review)
* La Désolation (Arkane, #1) (my review) + La Résurrection (Arkane, #2) (my review)
* Gigante (my review)
* Contes des sages d'outre-tombe (my review)
* Inkarmations (my review)
* Nouvelles Vagues (my review)

[TheDianaDiary’s · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intriguant au fur et à mesure du temps