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.
