Whiskey Tales

by Jean Ray, Scott Nicolay (Translator)

Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray, 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” and announced a new talent, even though this first book had been but the culmination of an already lengthy writing career as a journalist and short-story writer. A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years of a six-year sentence in prison, where he would write some of his best stories.

Something of a prequel to such story collections to come as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray testing different genres, but already steadfastly opposed to the psychological novel and embracing the modes of adventure and horror 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, and the real and the imagined.

A handful of these stories first appeared in English in various issues of Weird Tales back in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never before been translated. This first complete English-language edition includes eleven additional contemporary stories not found in the original French edition, and will be the first in many volumes of Jean Ray’s books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Weird Fiction, Fantasy, France, Belgium

213 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Raymundus Joannes de Kremer was a Flemish Belgian writer who used the pen names John Flanders and Jean Ray. He wrote both in Dutch and French.

He was born in Ghent, his father a minor port official, his mother the director of a girls' school. Ray was a fairly successful student but failed to complete his university studies, and from 1910 to 1919 he worked in clerical jobs in the city administration.

By the early 1920s he had joined the editorial team of the Journal de Gand. Later he also joined the monthly L'Ami du Livre. His first book, Les Contes du Whisky, a collection of fantastic and uncanny stories, was published during 1925.

During 1926 he was charged with embezzlement and sentenced to six years in prison, but served only two years. During his imprisonment he wrote two of his best-known long stories, The Shadowy Street and The Mainz Psalter. From the time of his release in 1929 until the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote virtually non-stop.

Between 1933 and 1940, he produced over a hundred tales in a series of detective stories, The Adventures of Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes. He had been hired to translate a series from the German, but he found the stories so bad that he suggested to his Amsterdam publisher that he should re-write them instead. The publisher agreed, provided only that each story be about the same length as the original, and match the book's cover illustration. The Harry Dickson stories are admired by the film director Alain Resnais among others. During the winter of 1959-1960 Resnais met with Ray in the hope of making a film based on the Harry Dickson character, but nothing came of the project.

During the Second World War Ray's prodigious output slowed, but he was able to publish his best works in French, under the name Jean Ray: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l'Indicible Peur, also adapted into a film starring Bourvil, Malpertuis, Les Cercles de L'Epouvante (all 1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944) and Le Livre des Fantômes (1947).

After the war he was again reduced to hackwork, writing comic-strip scenarios by the name of John Flanders. He was rescued from obscurity by Raymond Queneau and Roland Stragliati, whose influence got Malpertuis reprinted in French during 1956.

A few weeks before his death, he wrote his own mock epitaph in a letter to his friend Albert van Hageland: Ci gît Jean Ray/homme sinistre/qui ne fut rien/pas même ministre ("Here lies Jean Ray/A man sinister/who was nothing/not even a minister").

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

These early Jean Ray stories offer glimpses of even greater work to come from the Belgian author of the masterful Malpertuis. The collection includes adventure tales, nautical yarns, strange stories, and horror pieces (plenty of ghostly hands, if you're into that), many of which are just a few pages long. I most enjoy when Ray establishes a lush, eerie atmosphere (I love his obsession with mist), and these tales are often too short for him to accomplish that to a satisfactory extent. When he does take more time for exposition, though, he's spot on. Fair warning that a few of these stories include anti-Semitic content, which the translator Scott Nicolay discusses at length in the introduction.

Kudos to the excellent Wakefield Press for the start of their efforts to bring Jean Ray's stories back into English in their unexpurgated forms.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting one - it feels like an important artifact in the general history and evolution of the weird / strange fiction tale, but there are also a number of instances of antisemitism that can't exactly be swept under the rug. The translator's introduction does a great job of facing that head on, and his comments provide an actual interesting context and background without attempting in any way to explain away these occurrences, but - like Lovecraft - it's basically impossible to ignore.

This is more Poe-adjacent than Lovecraft-adjacent - which is fine, Poe is great - and there are some solid pieces here. There's a new Ray volume out from earlier this year, I'm looking to check it out as well.

[Jeffrey Canino]

Lovecraft: *writes something insanely bigoted*

Jean Ray: "hold my whiskey"

[Orrin Grey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ideally read in a run-down wharfside tavern in an imagined London as a mysterious fog rolls in, these stories mark some of the earliest by Jean Ray, the man who came to be known as "the Belgian Poe." I don't recall exactly where I first encountered Ray, whether it was his more famous weird short stories such as "The Mainz Psalter," or if it was his great weird novel Malpertuis, but ever since, I've been hankering after more of his stuff, and railing against the paucity of it that was readily available in English.

Fortunately, Scott Nicolay has taken it upon himself to translate the body of Ray's fantastique work into English, beginning with this collection, originally published in 1925. Even when these stories contain no hint of the supernatural, they are all weird, and all are told in Ray's unmistakably conversational tone, as the eponymous drink loosens tongues to tell tales that might be better left untold. Of course, the highlights for me are those stories that are unmistakable Weird, including one that I had read before, translated here as "The Cemetery Guard."

If these tales feel somewhat slight on their own compared to some of Ray's later work, the joy of having a complete collection helps to make up for it, and the fog-shrouded world of Ray's stories is conjured less from the power of any one tale in this collection than by having them all stacked up next to one-another. The only downside to this unexpurgated translation is that it retains the unfortunately virulent antisemitism contained in many of these stories; not, after all, a knock at the translation itself, but an unfortunately reality of the tales contained herein.

[Elusive.Mystery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charmingly old-fashioned horror or fantastic tales shared around a glass of whisky, as told in the first published works by the Belgian Master.

[ناني ماكفي · Rating 4 out of 5]

ملاحظة
كتابي رقم 777 عل غودريدز منذ بدات تدوين الكتب هنا
للعلم كان 2019 اظن
قبلها وعلى مدار سنوات وسنوات طويلة والحمد لله كنت أقرأ واقرأ ووصل المعدل لروايتين وثلاث في اليوم
وللاسف كل ذلك لم ادونه بل ونسيت العناوين اصل 😂
نعود لرواية
مجموعة قصصية قصيرة لا تتعدى الصفحات
غريبة المضمون احيانا لكنها ممتعة جدا
اتعرف على جون راي واحببت قلمه
التوليفة تشكيلة من اشياء عدة
عشقه لضباب كاىنات غريبة حشرات اشباح ... كله و انتقام ...وايد صغيرة و عرائس قاتلة وفامبايرز وباب ... وحراس مقبرة ...
و
hold my whisky

قيل معاد لسامية
لم ارى ذلك
ولكن هاك نجمة اخرى كمكافأة
اوديوبوك بإلقاء جميل على قناة يوتيوب
dismoi.eu

[Waffles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I would have enjoyed these stories more when I was younger and pulp horror was new to me.
That being said, I am grateful to Scott Nicolay for spending his time and energy to translating these tales and making them available for a wider audience.

I look forward to reading further translations.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But these ideas are my own, ideas born of whiskey, no doubt honorable, but whiskey-born all the same, and given the high morality of others, they will likely find no more echo in your soul than voices crying out in the wilderness."

Excellent translation by Scott Nicolay. Not all of these stories were weird fiction but I really enjoyed each of them.

[Andrew Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent translation and thoughtful introduction by Scott Nicolay, a great author of weird tales in his own right. Very happy he is working on translating Jean Ray's body of work into English, and really looking forward to forthcoming volumes.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I would like more whiskey, thank you…

And please do not let my glass fall empty from here on out. It gives me the courage I need to tell you what follows.”

Fans of the speculative sub-genre eventually known as ‘weird fiction’ typically associate its early development with names like Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps even Clark Ashton Smith and M.R. James, or Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson. In the peak of the Haute Weird era in the United States, publications like Weird Tales brought a variety of outré stories, filled with tentacled menaces, to a growing audience. Among the publications in English were some translations of stories originally written in French by an author with the pseudonym Jean Ray.

Born Raymundus Joannes de Kremer in 1887, he published his fantastic tales as Jean Ray, and used numerous other pen names, such as John Flanders, during the prolific periods of his writing. Early reviewers christened Ray the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London”, though a large part of his influence seems to have come from the character types of Dickens.

Up until the meticulous translation and publication of Ray’s work by Scott Nicolay and Wakefield Press, the most likely introduction to Jean Ray in English for modern readers might have been The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Though not as well-known as other members of the Weird crowd, Ray has been an acknowledged early influence on others in the field, including David Hartwell and Stephen King.

A superfan, translator, and writer of weird fiction, Nicolay has taken on the monstrous task of translating the entire corpus of Ray’s short fiction fantastique (and penning superior translations to those previously made.) Wakefield Press has released these in four volumes so far, with a fifth soon to be released.

First published as Les contes due whiskey in 1925, the collection brought Ray to international attention and several translated versions of select stories within it soon appeared. Nicolay’s translation provides, for the first time, a complete translation with stories appearing in their original published order: 16 “Whiskey Tales” proper followed by 11 designated “… And a Few More Stories from the Fog”. Previous translations into English (and I believe even republications in the French) omitted or changed text so that multiple versions of some stories exist. Nicolay’s translations strive to be as faithful as possible to the original versions, while noting variations and taking the entirety of Ray’s writing into perspective.

I’ll eventually say things about Ray’s stories, but I want to really stress the tremendous work that Nicolay brings to these translations: an academic service and a service of entertainment to weird fans, both. I read several of the stories in Whiskey Tales in the original French alongside Nicolay’s translation, and they perfectly capture the atmosphere of the stories, the idiosyncrasy of Ray’s word use, and the general effects of his writing. Further, Nicolay buffers the translation with footnotes that point out variations, difficult translation choices, and cultural references. The latter also falls into a category of what Nicolay dubs ‘Rayisms’ that he also clarifies in the footnotes, such as purposeful anachronism, or affected proper noun choices. I have never enjoyed reading footnotes so much as in these translations of Ray.

Nicolay additionally writes an extensive introduction to Whiskey Tales which enriches the reading experience of Ray’s work, and help place the stories and Nicolay’s translation into context. Most significant, is a discussion of Ray’s anti-Semitism and when, and how it pervades his writing. Nicolay vehemently argues that one cannot simply excuse Ray as ‘a man of his time’. But, at the same time as academic translator does not want to expunge the dirty text from Ray’s work as some other past translations have done. I am with Nicolay’s opinion on this. I similarly get angry when something like a Looney Tunes short is edited – or simply not shown – due to uncomfortable issues or topics that should be acknowledged and not forgotten.

For those bothered by anti-Semitism so that you wouldn’t want to see it, well you might not want to read Ray then, like many don’t want to read Lovecraft for his racism. However, Nicolay guides readers away the most blatant and frequent instances of anti-Semitism in the collection. Most falls into one or two stories that could be skipped.

From the very start Ray establishes some of the central elements to his writing. As the title suggests, whiskey figures as a theme to all the stories here, even if just forced into the story in some instances. Even beyond the theme though, Ray’s characters are the type to tell their tale over a shared bottle of whiskey or some other sort of alcohol.

Similar to other authors of the era, tales are structured around a yarn, in this case of the speculative weird genre, a supernatural yarn. Characters opening the story may be directly involved, or they might just be relating something they heard, building a story within a story. Where a writer like M.R. James uses this format in an academic setting or a gentleman’s club and the introduction of some discovered artifact or manuscript, Ray does the same, but in dingier, lower class settings. Ray’s characters are frequently sailors, smugglers, and riff-raff, telling their tale in a dive bar over those pours of whiskey. Usually, it is they who relate the strange occurrences that happened to the mad scientist, or the businessman, or read of the events that transpired in discovered materials.

Nicolay describes this as part of the mise en scène in Ray’s work, and notes how well the stories could work in the format of a play. Even in the early form of his writing in Whiskey Tales where the stories are just a few pages long, this feature can be seen. It becomes more developed over the years so that a big step occurs by the point of his well-regarded novellas in later volume Cruise of Shadows where there are multiple stories within the story and shifting plot directions.

Also visible from the first pages of Whiskey Tales is Ray’s frequent use of particular words and concepts, particularly the shadowy otherworldly effects of mists and fog. In an early story, he even uses the English term for fog to highlight its foreign nature, and conflates senses so that its menace becomes something audible:

“Walk faster. I feel the fog at our heels because I hear… I can hear they mist! It begins with a distant wailing, the cry of forgotten miseries appealing to millions of ears, and then it washes over you with the leaden clamor of heavy waves, forcing you to listen to hours of tiny voices, delicate and shrill, insulting you from behind closed doors, stifled death rattles arising from gloomy corners, a protracted illness splashing its spectral mendacities across the frosted windows of your office.”

Fascinations with hands also appears, the rough, calloused hands of workers grasping their shot glasses, or attacking from the darkness. An example of this occurs in a brief story of a man who sits alone at night with his drink, who receives a phantasmal midnight visitor. After thinking about the various souls from his miserable life who might return looking for revenge against him the story concludes:

“And from the vast night surrounding me, a hand appeared seizing me by the throat.

It trembled that hand, and it stunk of onions and pipe-smoke.

And I realized with bitterness and anger it was that no-good Bobby Moos who had come to steal my whiskey.”

I just adore that rough voice and the evocative scents of onion and pipe-smoke, the atmosphere of simultaneous chill and humor that the close brings.

The stories of Whiskey Tales are all about atmosphere. Many are snippets that could only loosely be considered to have plots. They elicit discomfort or unease. They often feature the supernatural, but might not yet truly be considered ‘weird’ in the way the genre ultimately became identified. They excel at creating atmosphere with their style and voice as the passages above. However, this also makes them somewhat repetitive to read all at once. They are good, even great. But simple enough that once you’ve enjoyed that mood a bit, you really start craving for a story that goes beyond just establishing mood and showing eccentric characters in dim-lit alley bars.

That is not to say that this is all that Whiskey Tales has to offer. Glimpses of what Ray’s work becomes can be seen in later selections in the collection that begin to take on more complex plots building from the atmosphere he had mastered. One of the most well received stories in this first collection seems to be “The Strange Studies of Dr. Paukenschläger”. It’s the first story by Ray that clearly falls into the ‘Weird’ category and features a very Lovecraftian plot. I actually didn’t care for it as much as many of the other stories, but then again, I don’t really like what I’ve read of Lovecraft and easily tire of horror inspired by his themes.

Readers that want to discover Ray from the start, or who love short atmospheric horror will benefit from picking up from the very beginning with Whiskey Tales. Those who want to avoid the blatant anti-Semitism or who might want to start out with a more fully-formed Ray who might be considered at the height of his craft in writing a Weird tale, might want to start with the second volume, Cruise of Shadows.

From my review for Speculative Fiction in Translation.S

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just like with many of Lovecraft's collections and/or longer pieces, this, the first collection from Jean Ray, has a lot of really enjoyable writing, but then loses points with me for its bigotry. Whereas Lovecraft was a horrible racist, Ray appears to have been an anti-Semite. Some of the stories in this collection, particularly in the first half or so, are barely even stories, rather they're vehicles to carry hate. Scott Nicolay, in his translations, opted to return all of it and present the volume as it was originally published. As much as it's unpleasant to deal with, I am glad he did so. Rather see the stories as they were intended all those years ago and judge them accordingly. I will say, some of the non-bigoted tales lived up to Ray's reputation as the "Belgian Poe", and foreshadow later works which drew comparison to Providence's most famous racist. The latter half of the collection almost entirely abandons the anti-Semitic passages, which makes me wonder if Ray himself was having second thoughts. I doubt it. I have read and enjoyed some of the later works in the VanderMeers' massive collection The Weird, and those offerings were brilliant; I do hope that later works from Ray, in general, are sewn from the same fabric as those, rather than the unsavory entries interspersed in this collection.

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jean Ray's short stories are very influential, so reading them feels like you're seeing the beginning of something great which is cool. But it also feels like you're seeing the predecessor to some other, better short story which you'll like more.

I think the stories here suffer from being in a collection; they vary pretty wildly in quality and many of them tread the same lines over and over again. The fog, the whiskey, the glimpse of the monster through the window, the person that changes into something else, etc. Although there are some strong standouts here, on the whole it started to feel very repetitive. Many of the stories are also extremely anti-Semitic, so be prepared for that.

I appreciate Ray's contribution to the genre, but I'm not sure I can really call this collection "good". Many of them are a bit silly in a melodramatic kind of way and some are just kind of pointless. It made for an interesting read but I think most of the stories here are too short to really be any good. Maybe worth it if you're a completist but my recommendation would be to pick and choose among his stronger works and skip some of the little stories in here.

[William Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed the bonkers narratives at first, but it became increasingly racist and anti-Jewish the firther in I read. To the point where one character asked why another did not kill 2 Jews instead of just the one because the more the better. Ugh. WTF. Wakefield Press, please stop publishing racists and xenophobes, even if they are "from another era".

[Eugene Novikov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Came to this from the two brilliant Jean Ray stories contained in the Vandermeer's "The Weird"; these are earlier tales, much shorter and often sketchier, though there are still a few corkers and it's fascinating to see Ray start to figure out "cosmic horror" in the collection's second half.

[Chiara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Ho preferito i racconti neri (dove c'è il whisky) a quelli fantastici (dove non c'è il whisky). Jean Ray è un adorabile impostore.

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This earliest volume of Jean Ray's short stories is the most interesting of the three collections I've read so far due to the book's titular "Whiskey Tales" section. In that section the individual tales are well-written but not particularly memorable, however the way that they interconnect makes the section more than the sum of its parts. The brief stories create a portrait of the fog-shrouded neighborhood encompassing the London docks, where a recurring cast of characters tell tales over glasses of good whiskey at the Enchanted Spot. Some are horror stories, some are fairy tales, some are meant to make you laugh, and these varied tales are told in varied ways, but they all feel like tales from this particular setting that Ray has created. While recurring elements in Ray's independent stories can make them feel repetitive, here these totems feel like connecting bonds that bind the section into a cohesive whole with a distinct atmosphere and tone.

Once you are past the Whiskey Tales section of this volume there are still several strong stories left to read, though they lack the feeling of arising from the same shared world. In particular The White Beast, The Cemetery Guard, and The Strange Studies of Dr. Paukenschlager are all noteworthy for being strikingly Lovecraftian even though the translator's introduction to this volume indicates that Ray was almost certainly not familiar with Lovecraft when he penned these works. This trio of tales are well worth seeking out if you want some works in the same vein as Lovecraft.
As always, Jean Ray's prose is very good, and the Scott Nicolay translation for the Wakefield Press edition is excellent. Here is a description of the setting for the Whiskey Tales section:

[T]his future, full of kingly joy for Hildesheim and Bobby Moos, would arise a few hours later, after the shutters closed their wooden eyelids over the rose-tinted windows of the Enchanted Spot, when the moon would roll, red and tired, over the black spars and taught ropes stretched like a huge seine across the dark sky, a gigantic net for ghosts and nightmares.

Good stuff. It's no Malpertuis, but besides that one Whiskey Tales is probably the strongest of Jean Ray's books I’ve read so far when considered as a whole (in terms of individual components, The Gloomy Alley from Ray’s Cruise of Shadows collection is stronger than any individual story in this collection). There are a few stories on the weaker side, but they are the exception, and the average quality level is quite good. I also appreciated what Ray did with the Whiskey Tales section, and wish he had used the shared universe concept more often (The City of Unspeakable Fear does something fundamentally different in my opinion). Even with its neat elements, though, it’s not particularly memorable. 3.5/5, rounding down.

[Dedi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mi trovo in difficoltà a fare questa recensione, perché vorrei sempre promuovere le piccole e medie case editrici, senza le quali leggeremmo sempre le stesse cose e non scopriremmo mai cose nuove.
Tuttavia devo esprimere il mio giudizio in modo onesto, manifestando quelle che sono state le mie impressioni.
La raccolta comprende 30 racconti, suddivisi in tre parti tematiche: i racconti del whisky, le storie nella nebbia e altre storie tra le ombre.
La prima parte, costituita da 16 racconti purtroppo è stata molto deludente. Sono storie generalmente molto brevi, delle istantanee che però non riescono a lasciare il segno. Dei 16 racconti solo due mi sono piaciuti e forse non è un caso che siano i due brani più corposi: Irsih whisky e Josuah Gullick prestatore su pegno. Sono due racconti che affondano le radici nell'avidità umana e nella vedetta che scaturisce quando ci si spinge troppo oltre.
La seconda parte è formata da 11 racconti e qui le cose migliorano di molto. Questi mi sono parsi racconti più strutturati, non tanto per la lunghezza media che più o meno si equivale, quanto per una trama più elaborata e convincente. La scimmia, La finestra dei mostri, La bestia bianca, Il quadro, sono tutti racconti godibili, ma su tutti svetta il miglior racconto della raccolta, Il guardiano del cimitero, una storia avvincente e di buone atmosfere.
La parte finale infine è composta da tre racconti, forse un pò fumosi, avviluppati dalle ombre, tra i quali a mio avviso spicca Durer l'idiota.
A lettura ultimata quindi a prevalere è un pò la delusione, per molti racconti che non riescono a lasciare un'impronta decisa.
Comunque ribadisco l'entusiasmo per Il guardiano del cimitero, una piccola perla.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the power down for what to turned out to be 24 hours and little else to do, I turned on the flashlight, poured myself some whiskey, pulled this off my shelf, and read it from end to end.

I have always been interested in reading Jean Ray's "Malpertuis," but for a long time the only English copy available was a long out of print edition selling for more money than I was willing to spend. Much to my pleasure I discovered that Wakefield Press was methodically translating Jean Ray's works of weird literature in a chronological order. Weird literature, unlike horror, is not (in my mind) intended to scare or gross out the reader. Rather, it is meant to make the reader 's skin crawl while leading the reader to question the boundaries of reality.

Whiskey Tales has two discrete sections. The first two-thirds are a gloriously atmospheric and creepy collection of loosely connected tales, set in a fog-shrouded London, almost always at night, involving patrons in and outside of Enchanted Spot, a tavern known for is whiskey. These short stories, 3 to 6 pages in length are pastiches of moments of unsettling dread. The quality of the tales vary greatly, but overall succeeds in creating a shivering sense of unease.

The last section, a handful of longer short stories, are set outside of London, and except possibly for the last tale, are unconnected to the first collection. They don't quite reach the same level of creepiness as the first grouping but were still enjoyable.

Yes, there is an alarming streak of anti-semitism throughout, which is off-putting, to say the least

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Otherwise worthwhile phantasmagoria ruined by virulent antisemitism.

---

I can hear the mist! It begins with a distant wailing, the cry of forgotten miseries appealing to millions of ears, and then it washes over you with the leaden clamor of heavy waves, forcing you to listen to hours of tiny voices, delicate and shrill, insulting you from behind closed doors, stifled death rattles arising from gloomy corners, a protracted illness splashing its spectral mendacities across the frosted windows of your office. No, linger not, nor raise your eyes to the enigma of the blank window in the shadows of the wall and the night. You promised me we would not discuss that "story"... Here is the bar! Let's close the door. The fog would carry a thousand evils into the room upon our heels. Ah, that's better! Have a look, then! Each bottle harbors a flame spirit in its taut smooth belly, like a little Parisian lodger. You see that pink shadow looming behind the peach brandy? Is it a woman's mouth? And the pattern cast in the molten glass that winds its supple emerald way around the chartreuse bottle... Oh! Oh! The shadow of that jug of Schiedam gin makes the figure of a monk upon the wall. What a hypocrite we have here! I wager he just drank with two or three sailors from Zeeland, who want to murder him good and proper in some lane close by High Street. Yet this golden trickle. this wonderful prayer he recites to the sun on his string of rosary beads at the end of the countertop, that's the whiskey. ("Irish Whiskey")

"Whiskey allows us a prayer before the big leap." ("The Last Gulp")

"Ich traume, es war Krieg..." ("Herr Hubich at Night")

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully characterful and timeful, with slick translated tactilities of slanted view of whatever incident passes our gaze. As has been this whole book, the ultimate requital of unrequited text, made fresh but still no doubt that text in its original essence. I feel that in my gut, at least. Uneven and corrected rectangles of paper pages. The correct and incorrect in presumed strange and beautiful synergy. Neat as well as fizzy brown. The curlew in the laughter or slaughter.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[ℳatthieu · Rating 3 out of 5]

C'est le troisième livre de l'auteur que je lis. Pourquoi insisté-je comme ça ? Je n'accroche pas du tout le style, c'est définitif ! Lecture peu fluide, parfois absconse, je n'ai souvent pas les références (noms, lieux, etc.). Dans ce recueil, les contes sont très brefs et se réduisent souvent à une unique scène. C'est vraiment dommage de ne pas exploiter plus l'histoire d'autant plus que le lecteur n'est pas dans le contexte tout de suite (le décor n'est pas vraiment planté) -- Il y a ici un petit côté William Faulkner.
Mes deux récits préférés sont Le crocodile et Le gardien du cimetière.

[Etienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malgré une écriture intéressante et une ambiance très bien créée, j'ai eu du mal à me plonger dans ce recueil de nouvelles et a véritablement apprécié ma lecture. L'ambiance et le style ne sont pas sans rappeler Poe et Maupssant, quand même, et le recueil nous offre une variété de nouvelles, avec des niveaux aussi variables. Je ne peux pas dire qu'il est mauvais, mais je n'ai pas vraiment apprécié non plus. J'aime mes nouvelles un peu plus «punchées» et ce n'est pas toujours le cas ici. Par contre, gros plus pour l'ambiance. À vous de vous faire votre avis!

[Gaylord D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une très belle découverte que cet auteur qui écrivait en 1920 avec une liberté et une modernité qui n'ont pas pris une ride. Certaines de ces nouvelles fantastiques sont de petit bijoux d'ambiance et d'horreur. Un style parfois déroutant, toujours captivant. La postface est très utile pour mieux appréhender certains aspects de l'oeuvre, notamment un antisémitisme caricatural et dérangeant très présent dans ces récits.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories that feels like a bridge between Poe and Lovecraft, with a lot of English settings that betray the influence of Dickens and this Belgian writer. The language is much more lithe and sprightly than either Lovecraft (thick and sometimes clunky) or Poe (still dense but much more graceful) and there is a bit more of the adventure story to them.

[Pierre-emmanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'ai particulièrement apprécié l'ambiance générale de ce recueil. Même si les nouvelles sont assez inégales, le ton et l'atmosphère commun (avec le whisky comme dénominateur) donne un cachet vraiment particulier à l'ensemble. C'est poisseux, miséreux et souvent violent.

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

REVIEW FORTHCOMING

[Birgitt Krumboeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master of the craft! I cannot believe that these stories are like one hundred years old...

[Joan Perr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly boring antisemitic garbage but The Cemetery Guard and The Strange Studies of Dr. Paukenschlager are worth reading

[Ira Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing set of stories in my opinion. I have read and liked other works by Jean Ray, but didn’t realize that this volume was marred by antisemitism. The translator deals with this in the forward, and to his credit doesn’t gloss over it.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of weird tales by criminally Belgium author Jean Ray, who's style, setting and subject are unique middle point between Charles Dickens and H.P Lovecraft