Miss Marple meets H.P. Lovecraft in Ray's genre-defying tale of
ghostly intrigue and murder
Published in occupied Belgium in 1943 a few months after his celebrated
novel Malpertuis, The City of Unspeakable Fear remains one of Jean
Ray's most curious works. Haunting an ambiguous interzone between
detective novel, horror fiction and Anglophile parody, it follows the
misadventures of presumed police officer Sidney Terence Triggs upon his
retirement to the sleepy English country town of Ingersham. A cast of
characters worthy of Dickens awaits him, from the sympathetic old clerk
Ebenezer Doove to the druggist Theobold Pycroft, the eccentric
department store owner Gregory Cobwell and a motley collection of other
humorously humdrum inhabitants.
The emphatically commonplace quickly gives way to haunted melodrama as
Triggs's new neighbors begin to die violently or vanish. His false
identity as a detective is put to the test under the threat of murderous
phantoms as city and citizens come apart at the seams.
Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of
Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer, a pivotal figure in the "Belgian
School of the Strange," who authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.
