Wartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise
of Shadows and 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.
