In 1999 the publication of Babylon Babies was very much praised by the critics and grew into his third best-seller in a row. It was later adapted for the screen by 20th Century Fox,  one of Hollywood’s major cinema production companies, with a 60,000-euro budget and Mathieu Kassowitz as film director. The novel was actually finalized in Canadian exile and was translated in nineteen countries. This novel became an essential landmark in his career. It finished off a loop that was initiated with La Sirène Rouge (“The Red Siren”). An important turn was then sensed. In spite of almost unanimously applauding critics, Dantec spoke of this book as a transitional one, the literary equivalent of a Beatles For Sale, an image that would please the Fab Four Maniac he is.

The musician Richard Pinhas came into contact with him in 1998. Heldon did not officially exist any longer but its guitar player proposed to Dantec a kind of “post-mortem” last stand to which he also invited the American writer Norman Spinrad. This was an offer that no old rock lover like Dantec could refuse. The project very soon materialized into reading texts from the Nietzschean philosopher Gilles Deleuze – of whom Pinhas was a student in the early 1970s – over some music. Dantec was not a special guest anymore but a proper active member of the group. This was the birth of the Schizotrope project with an album of which title would appear familiar to Dantec’s readers: The Life and Death Of Marie Zorn. Dantec read his own texts in it and a European and American tour followed as well as the materialization of later similar projects.