Jean Ray

ne of the most famous gothic/uncanny novels of 20th century French writing, Ray's work has been compared to the best of Lovecraft and Meyrink and has never been out of print since its first publication in 1943. The author was a man surrounded by as much mystery as the bizarre old mansion of Malpertuis where the insane and horrific events of this novel ineluctably unfold. Fellow writer, Thomas Owen, said of him: Jean Ray was a Gothic personality. He had about him a touch of the damned priest or the cathedral gargoyle.'

Malpertuis

Les contes du Whisky

My Own Private Spectres

La casa de las alucinaciones

Wartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise of Shadowsand progenitor of the "Belgian School of the Strange" During the Occupation, severed from contact with France and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray's short stories found a new audience during World War II, and gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a distinctly bourgeois everyday. Circles of Dread, Ray's fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection's portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as "The Marlyweck Cemetery," "The Inn of the Specters" and "The Story of the Wûlkh." Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Götz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate and the shifting, extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Jean Ray(1887-1964) delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of Dickens and Chaucer. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice and a Chicago gangster in fact covered over a more prosaic existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales.

Circles of Dread

I thought he loved me, but should love hurt that way? I was black and blue. I did not recognize the young girl standing before me in the mirror. Evil was all around me, and I had no idea how to get it out of my life. I never felt so alone, so distant from everybody in my life. I felt ashamed and lost. I looked into his eyes with every beating and saw red. His evil shone through. Sometimes I felt as if he was proud of himself. He liked molding me into this walking zombie that I was. He ruled my world. His torture was horrific, and I could not think for myself any longer. I was just what he wanted: a broken down little girl and he was my master. I saw the joy in his face as he looked at me. It must have made him feel good about himself, like he had all the power in the world. His laughs haunt me as well. I can still hear him, so evil. He could raise his voice and I would cower down like a wounded dog. He did things to me that are Immoral, and after doing what he had done, he always said, “I’m sorry. I just love you so much. I can’t let you ever leave me.” The very thought of me leaving him drove him to an evil rage, and the beating and rape would began all over again. He always said, “If I can’t have you, no one will.” It was horrific for me in every way. I developed bipolar disorder and had posttraumatic stress disorder. My life went from a happy childhood to an adult relationship that not even an adult should ever endure. Alcohol and drugs covered my wounds and numbed my mind, but they only made my life even worse than it was. I added fuel to my fire. I lived with the devil inside of me. He created the person that I was. He must have been so proud. And then a light of hope came to me. I was pregnant. The only good thing I got out of that man was my baby girl, but she also endured pain and trauma, and it started before she was even born. I had to do something, even if it was to kill him, which I fantasized about most of the time. The day came. He took her from me, and as a mother, I did the unthinkable. I could not let him hurt me anymore. He pulled his last string with me, and I was going pull the trigger on him and then myself. It had to end.

My Diary Where Evil Lives

phantast. Roman

Scott Nicolay

Footsteps in an abandoned holiday resort as the cold weather settles in; a knock on the door of a hut in the middle of an isolated bog; a lane in Rotterdam perceptible to only one inhabitant in the city. In Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray began to fully explore the trappings of the ghost story to produce a new brand of horror tale: one that described the lineaments of a universe adjacent to this one, in which objects sweat hatred and fear, and where the individual must face the unknown in utter isolation. First published in 1931, two years after he served his prison sentence for embezzling funds for his literary magazine, Ray's second story collection failed to find the success of his first one, Whiskey Tales, but has emerged over the years as a key publication in the Belgian School of the Strange. It has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, though it contains some of Ray's most anthologized and celebrated stories, including two of his best known, "The Mainz Psalter" and "The Shadowy Alley." This is the book's first English translation, and the second of the volumes of Ray's books to be published by Wakefield Press. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Jean Ray(1887-1964) delivered tales of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the "Belgian School of the Strange," Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.

Haunted Stories of Land and Sea

Cruise of Shadows

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale After the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal. Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray's personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher's monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kümmel and keep watch over a deceased woman's apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader's expectations as they do with their characters. Jean Ray(1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.

Tales of Dread

The Great Nocturnal

Liu Cixin

Dale Bailey

MARSHALL GROVE était né dans Borough, en une année où les démo-lisseurs avaient, on ne sait en obéissance à quel ordre municipal, cessé de manier, dans ce vieux et pittoresque quartier, le fer et le juron. Au fait, l’épicerie paternelle où il vit le jour, parmi les barils de mélasse, les régimes de millet et les bocaux de marinades, se trouvait à l’angle de Marshallsea Street et d’une venelle sans nom où ne s’ouvraient que d’antiques remises. Son père, Sol Grove, qui avait les mauvais payeurs en horreur, déplorait de tout son coeur sec et honnête la disparition de la vieille prison pour dettes : la Marshall Sea, et c’était par double estime pour cette geôle de la justice financière et de la rue qui abritait son négoce, qu’il donna à son fils le nom de Marshall, au mépris du parrain, Jérémiah Tulkes, qui aurait voulu éterniser son honorable prénom au moyen de la descendance des Grove. Jean Ray L’Histoire de Marshall Grove

Spécial Jean Ray

Bifrost n° 87

La méthode de l'économie politique d'après John Stuart Mill

HARRY DICKSON, LE PROFESSEUR FLAX, MONSTRE HUMAIN.

Les contes de Canterbury. Malpertuis. Les nouveaux contes

Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887-1964), whose writings in the coming years would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the "Belgian Poe." A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in prison, where he would write some of his best stories. Something of a prequel to later collections such as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard. Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined. A handful of these stories first appeared in English in Weird Tales in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.

Jean Ray

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