A ship sails into another dimension. A house in Hamburg is besieged by invisible forces. The greatest detective in the world battles a monster of unknown origin under the streets of London. These are stories of Jean Ray, who was known as “The Belgian Poe.” Other writers he was similar to are H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, and Guy de Maussapant.

I first read Ray’s fiction in the doorstopper anthology The Weird by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer which reprinted his stories “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Street.” Reading these stories, I felt like I did when I first read Lovecraft. They were tales of cosmic horror of immense power and imagination. I decided I would seek out more of his fiction.

This turned out to be harder than I would have liked. Until recently, Ray’s works were rare and expensive. His collection Ghouls in My Grave can go for a hundred dollars online. However, I did acquire two volumes of his Harry Dickson stories and a copy of his novel, Malpertuis. Recently, Wakefield Press has started reprinting collections of his short fiction with Whiskey Tales and Cruise of Shadows.

The Man:
Jean Ray was born Raymundus Joannes de Kremer in Ghent. While he liked to tell stories about being a sailor, having an American Indian grandmother, and being a lion tamer among other vocations, the reality is that he had a prosaic background. He worked various clerical jobs. In the 1920s, he served as an editor to two literary journals. After the failure of one, he was charged with embezzlement and served two years in prison. This destroyed his literary reputation; though ironically he would write his best work and help create what is known as “the Belgian School of the Strange” during this period. He wrote under various pseudonyms of which Jean Ray was the best known. Under the name John Flanders, he was translated and published in Weird Tales, sometimes in the same issue as Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft, he wrote tales of cosmic horror that were drawn from the science of non-Euclidian geometry. Like Poe, his stories have the atmosphere of a nightmare.

Whiskey Tales:
This was the first collection he published in his native Belgium. It came out to great critical acclaim and is what earned him the comparison to Poe. As is often the case, I found the critics to be wrong. I found this collection disappointing. None of the stories had the power of the “The Mainz Psalter” or “The Shadowy Street.” It was a loose collection of vignettes about a group of drunks in London. Some of the stories had horror elements and some did not. If disappointing it was not awful. The stories, even the non-horrific, showed Ray’s mastery of atmosphere. There were also some stories that stood out like “The Cemetery Guard,” a decent vampire story, and “The Strange Studies of Dr. Paukenslager.” The later was Ray’s first foray into horror of the cosmic variety and themes he would use in later stories.

Cruise of Shadows:
The second story collection released by Wakefield Press, however, was much better. Cruise of Shadows contains some of his best work including new translations of “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Street” (now called “The Gloomy Alley.) Translator Scott Nicolay considers this to be Ray’s masterpiece. While I think Malpertuis could rival it, he might be right. “The Mainz Psalter” in which a ship of the same name sails into another world brings to mind the cosmic horror of Lovecraft and sea horror of William Hope Hodgson. Nicolay in his afterword likens the relentless narrative to the likes to Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore. One can see similarity between Moore’s Jirel of Joiry tales and “The Mainz Psalter.” Both deal with travels into other dimensions. Both deal with the fear of being in an alien world with alien laws.

“The Gloomy Alley,” is in some ways the opposite. It brings alien horrors of other dimensions into our own. It also is really two different but linked stories. The first deals with a household besieged by invisible beings. In it Ray creates an atmosphere that is nightmarish and claustrophobic. The characters are tormented by forces they do not understand. People disappear without a trace. The rest of the city (Hamburg) is beset by disappearances and gruesome murders. The characters respond to the horror in different but fascinating ways. The second story is narrated by man who discovers a street in the same city which no one else has heard of or can even see. It appears to exist in another dimension. In love with a woman who cares only for money, he decides to burglarize the street. This upsets the street’s invisible inhabitants. “The Gloomy Alley” is a jigsaw puzzle of a story. It is implicit that the larcenous actions of the narrator of the second story trigger the horrors of the first.

In both stories we are left with unanswered questions. What is the purpose of the voyage in “The Mainz Psalter?” Who, or rather what, are the inhabitants of “The Gloomy Alley?” These questions make the stories all the more frightening. The stories also show that Ray like Lovecraft drew on the science of other dimensions to inspire fear of the unknown.

The other stories in Cruise of Shadows are uniformly excellent.

Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes:
The stories of Harry Dickson are an interesting body of work. They started as unauthorized German stories of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective. Fearing Conan Doyle’s lawyer, the name of the main character was changed to Harry Dickson. Ray was hired to translate the tales. He soon grew tired of the mediocre stories and suggested to the publisher he write new ones about the character. Two volumes of these stories have been released in the US: Harry Dickson: The Heir of Dracula and Harry Dickson vs. The Spider by Black Coat Press.

The Dickson stories are in some ways more akin to the Sexton Blake than Sherlock Holmes. That is to say more action oriented than cerebral. Some of them do however contain elements of the weird. The Heir of Dracula collects four such stories. In the title story, Dickson battles a man who claims to be a vampire and a descendant of Bram Stoker’s character. It is a decent gothic mystery. More interesting are the other stories. In “The Iron Temple,” Dickson battles a creature called Gurrhu who at first seems to be from outer space. The revelation of Gurrhu’s true nature is earthbound but still suitably weird and, in fact, arguably less cliché than an alien monster. “The Return of the Gorgon” involves an investigation into a serial killer who turns his victims into statues and femme fatale Eurayle Ellis who claims to be a reincarnation of Medusa. Themes and ideas from this story would resurface in Malpertuis. The final story, “The Curse of the Crimson Heart,” introduces detective Monsieur Triggs who apparently also had his own series by Ray.

Malpertuis:
Ray’s most famous work is his novel Malpertuis and rivals Cruise of Shadows for his masterpiece. Malpertuis is the cursed house of the dying sorcerer Quentin Cassave. His will dictates that his heirs must live in the house for the rest of their lives and that the last two, if they be male and female, must marry if they are to inherit his fortune. The story also involves a sea journey years previous and the gods of Greek Mythology. It would give away too much of the plot to explain how. Once again Ray shows his ability to create a nightmarish and claustrophobic atmosphere. The story, which is mostly told through diaries of its characters stolen by a thief from a monastery, uses multiple narratives. Again the plot is like that of a jigsaw puzzle. The revelation of Cassave’s scheme and the exact nature of the inhabitants of the house is a startling and unique idea. Malpertuis was turned into a film with Orson Welles.

Summation:
Jean Ray was a master of the weird tale. He had prodigious imagination. Malpertuis stands with “The House of Usher” as an edifice of horror. “The Mainz Psalter” is as terrifying a voyage as the one to the Mountains of Madness. It is long overdue that his works have come to our shores.