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Cruise of Shadows: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea
Footsteps in an abandoned holiday resort as the cold weather settles in; a door that opens in an empty house; a knock on the door of a hut in the middle of an isolated bog; a lane in Rotterdam perceptible to only one inhabitant in the city; a tavern without a sign, serving alcohol on endless credit that produces no intoxication, promising only the end to an endless street. In Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray began to fully explore the trappings of the ghost story to produce a new brand of horror tale: one that described the lineaments to a universe adjacent to this one, an extradimensional space beyond space in which objects sweat hatred and fear, and where the individual must face the unknown in utter isolation. First published in 1931, two years after he served his prison sentence for embezzling funds for his literary magazine, Jean Ray’s second story collection failed to find the success of his first one, Whiskey Tales, but has emerged over the years as a key publication in the Belgian School of the Strange. This staple volume of weird literature has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, even though it contains some of Ray’s most anthologized and celebrated stories, including two of his best known, “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Alley.” This is the book’s first English translation, and the second of the volumes of Ray’s books to be published by Wakefield Press.
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 delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Gregory Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it 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, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.
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 delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Gregory Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it 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, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.
205 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1931
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About the author
Jean Ray
271 books117 followersRaymundus 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").
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").
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
August 16, 2024
This was my first foray into Jean Ray's territory, and I liked it. The author adds a mystical darkness into his stories, and most of them contain a surety of ill fortune. The last two stories in the book were my favorites (The Gloomy Alley and The Mainz Psalter). The author does not shy away from oblique and/or violent endings. More J. Ray for me, thank you.
February 27, 2020
The three-star rating here reflects my feelings toward this book in relation to what I still consider to be Ray's masterpiece—the novel Malpertuis. In his afterword, translator Scott Nicolay makes the case that this collection is actually Ray's masterpiece. And I get that—in the context and tradition of weird fiction it may very well be the case (not having read all of his short weird fiction, I can't form a definitive opinion, although many do consider this collection to contain much of his best work). Malpertuis is a literary anomaly, which is partly why I love it so much, while these tales fall very much in the weird tradition, with a distincly 'Rayen' flavor to them. As a whole, the collection certainly moves light years beyond Ray's debut Whiskey Tales. The tales in that book are often not much more than sketches, and some don't even really fit into the category of weird fiction. This book's stories are much more developed, particularly the last two, and most wholly 'weird' in nature.
The fact that more of Ray's fiction didn't make it into English translation earlier is tragic, as his style would no doubt have had a wider influence in the weird fiction realm than it ultimately did, given how many of those early influencers were writing in English. At any rate, it's good that Wakefield Press is finally accomplishing that translation and publication, as English-reading weird fiction fans will have much to rejoice (and/or recoil) at within these pages.
The fact that more of Ray's fiction didn't make it into English translation earlier is tragic, as his style would no doubt have had a wider influence in the weird fiction realm than it ultimately did, given how many of those early influencers were writing in English. At any rate, it's good that Wakefield Press is finally accomplishing that translation and publication, as English-reading weird fiction fans will have much to rejoice (and/or recoil) at within these pages.
December 28, 2019
Scott Nicolay is doing the proverbial lord's work in translating the weird, short fiction of prolific Belgian author Jean Ray (not getting into his many pseudonyms, of which this is actually one) into English.
In this game, we talk a lot about H.P. Lovecraft and less than we should about folks like William Hope Hodgson, Manly Wade Wellman, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and the like. But even they get more attention in the anglophone weird fiction community than Ray, whose work deserves every bit as much good press as any of their number, in my humble estimation.
The previous volume of Nicolay's translations from Wakefield Press, Whiskey Tales, was already a rare jewel for someone like me, who came to it thirsty for more Jean Ray stories. But, though it made Ray's reputation in his native language - a reputation that was shortly ruined when he went to prison - it has less to offer those who are not already aficionados of the weird and macabre or fans of "the Belgian Poe," as Ray was sometimes called.
There are classic stories of the weird and ghostly in Whiskey Tales, to be sure, but many of them are little more than vignettes, and while all share the unmistakable absurdity and melancholy of Ray's voice, several lack any overt supernatural element.
In his translator's afterword, Nicolay makes the argument that Cruise of Shadows may be Ray's masterwork of the Weird, and I would not be disinclined to agree. All of the stories in Cruise are longer, more refined, and more overtly supernatural than many of those in Whiskey Tales. The virulent antisemitism that marred those earlier stories is here also at least deflated somewhat, if not gone completely.
The joy of reading Ray is, in no small part, the joy that he takes in language, and Nicolay retains that joy in his translations. Even the three stories in this latest volume that I had read before felt fresh and new here, not least because, in "The Mainz Psalter" - possibly Ray 's most famous short - there is an entire section that is newly reinstated that was not present in the previous translation.
Accompanying each of the stories are extensive translator's notes that help to explain the idiosyncrasies of the language and to supply context for the tales. For all their many allusions to things of the day, their intentional archaisms, and so on, these tales feel vital and fresh and modern in ways that make Ray's contemporaries - including Lovecraft, to whose writing I mean no slight here - feel old-fashioned and straightforward by comparison.
Ray's writing is conversational. These are - often literally - tales told in bars, spoken by tongues loosened by drink. They take circuitous routes, become infected by the obsessions, the whims, the tics, and the cul-de-sacs of their narrators. In many ways, this very circumlocution grants the stories much of their weird power.
The majesty of Ray's prose is in its ability to conjure - not a clear image of a thing, but a clear feeling of it. An atmosphere - oppressive, claustrophobic, inescapably strange - that is called forth like a poet, out of a handful of allusions and carefully-chosen words.
For fans of Weird fiction or "the Belgian Poe," both of these volumes (and all others that are forthcoming) are must-haves. For those whose affections toward the genre are more diffident or who are simply new to the works of Jean Ray, I would recommend starting with Cruise of Shadows. Then, once you're hooked, you won't be able to get enough.
In this game, we talk a lot about H.P. Lovecraft and less than we should about folks like William Hope Hodgson, Manly Wade Wellman, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and the like. But even they get more attention in the anglophone weird fiction community than Ray, whose work deserves every bit as much good press as any of their number, in my humble estimation.
The previous volume of Nicolay's translations from Wakefield Press, Whiskey Tales, was already a rare jewel for someone like me, who came to it thirsty for more Jean Ray stories. But, though it made Ray's reputation in his native language - a reputation that was shortly ruined when he went to prison - it has less to offer those who are not already aficionados of the weird and macabre or fans of "the Belgian Poe," as Ray was sometimes called.
There are classic stories of the weird and ghostly in Whiskey Tales, to be sure, but many of them are little more than vignettes, and while all share the unmistakable absurdity and melancholy of Ray's voice, several lack any overt supernatural element.
In his translator's afterword, Nicolay makes the argument that Cruise of Shadows may be Ray's masterwork of the Weird, and I would not be disinclined to agree. All of the stories in Cruise are longer, more refined, and more overtly supernatural than many of those in Whiskey Tales. The virulent antisemitism that marred those earlier stories is here also at least deflated somewhat, if not gone completely.
The joy of reading Ray is, in no small part, the joy that he takes in language, and Nicolay retains that joy in his translations. Even the three stories in this latest volume that I had read before felt fresh and new here, not least because, in "The Mainz Psalter" - possibly Ray 's most famous short - there is an entire section that is newly reinstated that was not present in the previous translation.
Accompanying each of the stories are extensive translator's notes that help to explain the idiosyncrasies of the language and to supply context for the tales. For all their many allusions to things of the day, their intentional archaisms, and so on, these tales feel vital and fresh and modern in ways that make Ray's contemporaries - including Lovecraft, to whose writing I mean no slight here - feel old-fashioned and straightforward by comparison.
Ray's writing is conversational. These are - often literally - tales told in bars, spoken by tongues loosened by drink. They take circuitous routes, become infected by the obsessions, the whims, the tics, and the cul-de-sacs of their narrators. In many ways, this very circumlocution grants the stories much of their weird power.
The majesty of Ray's prose is in its ability to conjure - not a clear image of a thing, but a clear feeling of it. An atmosphere - oppressive, claustrophobic, inescapably strange - that is called forth like a poet, out of a handful of allusions and carefully-chosen words.
For fans of Weird fiction or "the Belgian Poe," both of these volumes (and all others that are forthcoming) are must-haves. For those whose affections toward the genre are more diffident or who are simply new to the works of Jean Ray, I would recommend starting with Cruise of Shadows. Then, once you're hooked, you won't be able to get enough.
June 6, 2020
This stunning collection marked a dramatic shift of gear in Jean Ray's weird fiction. It contains a couple of his dead-cert classics (The Mainz Psalter, The Gloomy Alley), but it is much more than just those stories. I'm not going to say anything about the content of this work by 'the Belgian Poe', but translator Scott Nicolay (in a loving and useful Afterword) makes a good case for Ray to be seen in the context of WH Hodgson, Hans Heinz Ewers, Guy de Maupassant and Lovecraft as much as Poe. Nicolay points to this volume as the shift from the rather simpler plot constructions of 'Whiskey Tales' (also now available in English from Wakefield https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...) towards a more fully realised mesh of really strange elements. I came to this through my love of Ray's Harry Dickson tales, so started here rather than the earlier book, but I'll be getting to that - and the rest of Wakefield's ongoing series in due and grateful course.
I can't quite agree with Nicolay that this book, rather than the towering Malpertuis (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...), is the pinnacle of Jean Ray's writing - which may be because I'm not so fixated on (or invested in) 'weird' as a literary category - but Nicolay deserves full credit for this labour of love. His translations read well, and the notes sometimes offer excellent insight into the qualities of Ray's prose as well as the literary background shimmering behind Ray's writing. (One long discussion of a particularly tricky word to translate concludes 'The Anglophone world has no comparably freighted term, alas, so I resort instead to this note to provide some of the context that Jean Ray was able to evoke simply through his choice of words').
Sometimes the very existence of a book gives you joy. If its contents also give you a dislocated sense of unease, so much the better.
I can't quite agree with Nicolay that this book, rather than the towering Malpertuis (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...), is the pinnacle of Jean Ray's writing - which may be because I'm not so fixated on (or invested in) 'weird' as a literary category - but Nicolay deserves full credit for this labour of love. His translations read well, and the notes sometimes offer excellent insight into the qualities of Ray's prose as well as the literary background shimmering behind Ray's writing. (One long discussion of a particularly tricky word to translate concludes 'The Anglophone world has no comparably freighted term, alas, so I resort instead to this note to provide some of the context that Jean Ray was able to evoke simply through his choice of words').
Sometimes the very existence of a book gives you joy. If its contents also give you a dislocated sense of unease, so much the better.
March 3, 2023
My knowledge of Jean Ray is basically through reputation as the apparent Belgian Poe/ Lovecraft and his masterpiece, Malpertuis (which I became aware of via the film version), so I only had very vague ideas of what I was letting myself in for
And by god, am I glad of that - the collection’s power comes from the slow, inexorable build up of tension through the early stories to the final two almost novellas which are, frankly, devastating in their oddness and how troubling they get. There’s a sort of low key thematic sense of shared obsessions in the stories - that the afterword is particularly good at getting to grips with - so you get a slightly less intense but no less worrying experience that you do in, say, The King in Yellow. But the most refreshing thing is that Ray is in no way merely the Belgian anyone - he’s his own master, brilliant at building up troubling dread. The Gloomy Alley is already one of my favourite weird stories ever, an ever spiralling series of strangeness that feels close to - but never quite fully forming as - a fever dream
Usually I tend to skip over the translation details and footnotes, but in this volume they are absolutely essential - Nicolay does a superb, thoughtful and scholarly job at putting them into context within Ray’s own work and those of his fellow writers of the nascent forms of weird fiction as we know it. A classic
And by god, am I glad of that - the collection’s power comes from the slow, inexorable build up of tension through the early stories to the final two almost novellas which are, frankly, devastating in their oddness and how troubling they get. There’s a sort of low key thematic sense of shared obsessions in the stories - that the afterword is particularly good at getting to grips with - so you get a slightly less intense but no less worrying experience that you do in, say, The King in Yellow. But the most refreshing thing is that Ray is in no way merely the Belgian anyone - he’s his own master, brilliant at building up troubling dread. The Gloomy Alley is already one of my favourite weird stories ever, an ever spiralling series of strangeness that feels close to - but never quite fully forming as - a fever dream
Usually I tend to skip over the translation details and footnotes, but in this volume they are absolutely essential - Nicolay does a superb, thoughtful and scholarly job at putting them into context within Ray’s own work and those of his fellow writers of the nascent forms of weird fiction as we know it. A classic
March 13, 2022
This is said to be Ray's best collection of weird tales: with one exception, I found them enjoyable but disappointing after the bewildering ingenuity and panache of Malpertuis.
That exception is "The Gloomy Alley", an excellent horror/science-fiction novella in which Ray makes good use of the concept of multiple intersecting dimensions, an idea that appears to have obsessed him, judging from the frequency with which it turns up in his stories.
"The Mainz Psalter" features it as well, and has magnificent moments of sheer, inexplicable weirdness, but is undermined by clumsy dialogue and characterizations.
The remaining tales are on a lesser level, although all are interesting. "The Last Guest" made it into Weird Tales, where Lovecraft noted it with mild enthusiasm; it is probably the most conventional story in the lot, but does well treading familiar ground.
"The End of the Street" suffers from the disjointedness and diffuseness that other reviewers have noted in Ray's work, but its opacity to some extent enhances the story's nightmarish atmosphere.
"Mondschein-Dampfer" is generally well-written, and saves Faustian bargains from complete literary banality, but the last-minute lunge at resolution through Einsteinian relativity—or is it non-Euclidean geometry?—doesn't come off.
Ray's quirky sense of humour is frequently deployed to contrast with his otherwise dark subject matter, and can either detract from a mood, or brighten a sluggish narrative. It works well in "Dürer, the Idiot".
Scott Nicolay's extensive annotations are, well, over-wrought.
That exception is "The Gloomy Alley", an excellent horror/science-fiction novella in which Ray makes good use of the concept of multiple intersecting dimensions, an idea that appears to have obsessed him, judging from the frequency with which it turns up in his stories.
"The Mainz Psalter" features it as well, and has magnificent moments of sheer, inexplicable weirdness, but is undermined by clumsy dialogue and characterizations.
The remaining tales are on a lesser level, although all are interesting. "The Last Guest" made it into Weird Tales, where Lovecraft noted it with mild enthusiasm; it is probably the most conventional story in the lot, but does well treading familiar ground.
"The End of the Street" suffers from the disjointedness and diffuseness that other reviewers have noted in Ray's work, but its opacity to some extent enhances the story's nightmarish atmosphere.
"Mondschein-Dampfer" is generally well-written, and saves Faustian bargains from complete literary banality, but the last-minute lunge at resolution through Einsteinian relativity—or is it non-Euclidean geometry?—doesn't come off.
Ray's quirky sense of humour is frequently deployed to contrast with his otherwise dark subject matter, and can either detract from a mood, or brighten a sluggish narrative. It works well in "Dürer, the Idiot".
Scott Nicolay's extensive annotations are, well, over-wrought.
August 6, 2023
Niti lepše edicije niti nesposobnijeg urednika iste
October 11, 2022
Super-good book with some really impressive stories. DON'T READ THIS IF YOU PLAN ON GOING ON A CRUISE SHIP!!!
January 9, 2021
The end of this work. And I have today lost completely my confidence in gestalt real-time reviewing by finding myself incapable of grappling with this story’s grappling at me back! It is certainly frightening and haunting and mind-expanding, but the more the mind expands the less the mind can grip, I have now found. Or is it because I am getting too old, but even when looking back at my eight year old review of it, as reproduced above, that review seems to make things worse for me, as if my past self left a conceptual booby-trap for my current self today! All I can dwell on are the two fires in this work, amid other plagues and monsters of madness, i.e. the fire explosion that caused the manuscripts to exist out of time’s bale in the first place, and then in turn they are burnt and destroyed by the urban fire that such manuscripts caused by describing them in the very same first place.
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.
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.
June 11, 2025
Some pretty classic stories in this collection. The Gloomy Alley may have been my favorite. Mainz Psalter I'd previously read in The Weird, and it's also fun. Given the fact they're two of the author's most well known stories, it's no wonder really that they ended up being favorites.
November 30, 2023
This was my first encounter with Jean Ray, the "Belgian Poe", and lead figure of the "Belgian School of the Strange". (Others include Franz Hellens and Thomas Owen.) This will not be my last book by him!
The first few stories are nice, and feel a bit like Poe and even more like Ligotti. Not much actually happens, but the stories have a nice feeling of mounting dread. There is always whisky (or rum) and lots of dive bars with sailors, so I guess that is where the nickname the "Flemish Jack London" comes from.
The last three stories are the best. The translator (Scott Nicolay) claims that "The Mainz Psalter" and "The Gloomy Alley" are perhaps even better than his widely-acknowledged masterpiece Malpertuis. For me, "Mondschein-Dampfer" is also very good, as an interesting spin on the Faust myth.
I will now definitely read Malpertuis, which has been on my list for ages.
Note that I read the translation by Scott Nicolay which is shorter than the original French collection La Croisière des ombres because the French version also includes stories from his earlier, and possibly inferior, collection. All the ones in this collection were written while he was in prison.
The first few stories are nice, and feel a bit like Poe and even more like Ligotti. Not much actually happens, but the stories have a nice feeling of mounting dread. There is always whisky (or rum) and lots of dive bars with sailors, so I guess that is where the nickname the "Flemish Jack London" comes from.
The last three stories are the best. The translator (Scott Nicolay) claims that "The Mainz Psalter" and "The Gloomy Alley" are perhaps even better than his widely-acknowledged masterpiece Malpertuis. For me, "Mondschein-Dampfer" is also very good, as an interesting spin on the Faust myth.
I will now definitely read Malpertuis, which has been on my list for ages.
Note that I read the translation by Scott Nicolay which is shorter than the original French collection La Croisière des ombres because the French version also includes stories from his earlier, and possibly inferior, collection. All the ones in this collection were written while he was in prison.
June 1, 2022
Jean Ray's prose is head and shoulders above the writing of comparable writers Hodgson, Lovecraft, and Blackwood, making the works in Cruise of Shadows enjoyable to read even though they repeat elements and several of them don't come together into cohesive stories. This is the collection for you if you like tales featuring storms, sounds in the darkness, invisible violent entities, and disappearances. This is probably not the collection for you if you are looking for a showcase of authorial range.
This is not to say that Ray fails to use these repeated elements to good effect, in fact quite the opposite. My favorite work in the collection is The Gloomy Alley (in particular its first half), which features all of those elements. My enjoyment did not hinge upon whether these elements were featured or not, but rather upon whether Ray created a cohesive story with whatever elements he chose to use. My least favorite works in the collection were The End of the Street and Durer the Idiot, phantasmagorias that have strong individual scenes, but that did not feel like complete works. The End of the Street in particular felt like Ray throwing a whole lot of things at the wall, illustrated by its disconnected reference to “immense beings of moonlight praying to the stars.”
Among the strongest works in the collection is The Mainz Psalter, a story strongly reminiscent of Hodgson’s The Ghost Ships (and indeed, the excellent translator’s afterword confirms this connection). The Mainz Psalter is not a mere copy, however, but an improvement on its inspiration in almost every way. The fact that the two longest works in the collection are also the strongest make me excited for Wakefield’s upcoming translation of one of Ray’s novels. It is worth mentioning that none of the works in Cruise of Shadows are quite on the same level as Ray’s already translated novel Malpertuis, though if expanded further I think The Gloomy Alley could have given it a run for its money.
Cruise of Shadows presents the problem that so many collections do: How do I rate a group of stories where the best pieces are quite good, but the worst pieces didn’t work? Sometimes it seems unfair to average out a collection rather than to focus on its strongest works, but here where the stories share so many similarities that some of them seem to blend together, an averaged score seems appropriate. I rate Cruise of Shadows a 3.5/5, rounding down, a decision I'm more confident about now a few months after finishing the book as no individual stories really stuck with me. As always, the Wakefield Press edition is excellent. In addition to the aforementioned strong translator’s afterword, the translator’s notes are also excellent, providing both necessary historical context and exploring the translation of Ray’s vocabulary rich writing in an interesting manner. Even though this collection had some misses, I look forward to reading more Jean Ray in the near future.
This is not to say that Ray fails to use these repeated elements to good effect, in fact quite the opposite. My favorite work in the collection is The Gloomy Alley (in particular its first half), which features all of those elements. My enjoyment did not hinge upon whether these elements were featured or not, but rather upon whether Ray created a cohesive story with whatever elements he chose to use. My least favorite works in the collection were The End of the Street and Durer the Idiot, phantasmagorias that have strong individual scenes, but that did not feel like complete works. The End of the Street in particular felt like Ray throwing a whole lot of things at the wall, illustrated by its disconnected reference to “immense beings of moonlight praying to the stars.”
Among the strongest works in the collection is The Mainz Psalter, a story strongly reminiscent of Hodgson’s The Ghost Ships (and indeed, the excellent translator’s afterword confirms this connection). The Mainz Psalter is not a mere copy, however, but an improvement on its inspiration in almost every way. The fact that the two longest works in the collection are also the strongest make me excited for Wakefield’s upcoming translation of one of Ray’s novels. It is worth mentioning that none of the works in Cruise of Shadows are quite on the same level as Ray’s already translated novel Malpertuis, though if expanded further I think The Gloomy Alley could have given it a run for its money.
Cruise of Shadows presents the problem that so many collections do: How do I rate a group of stories where the best pieces are quite good, but the worst pieces didn’t work? Sometimes it seems unfair to average out a collection rather than to focus on its strongest works, but here where the stories share so many similarities that some of them seem to blend together, an averaged score seems appropriate. I rate Cruise of Shadows a 3.5/5, rounding down, a decision I'm more confident about now a few months after finishing the book as no individual stories really stuck with me. As always, the Wakefield Press edition is excellent. In addition to the aforementioned strong translator’s afterword, the translator’s notes are also excellent, providing both necessary historical context and exploring the translation of Ray’s vocabulary rich writing in an interesting manner. Even though this collection had some misses, I look forward to reading more Jean Ray in the near future.
November 14, 2022
When Horror Metastasizes: A Review of Jean Ray’s Cruise of Shadows: Stories of Land and Sea
Where exactly do we situate the weird stories of Jean Ray? Poe’s short stories are brilliantly baroque in their density and for the myriad cogitations of the protagonists. M. R. James, born about 20 years before Jean Ray, but at times his contemporary, borders on the creeps with dead men’s tales and a whistling in the mist. Lovecraft ladles from a bucket of strange brew, as does Thomas Ligotti, the latter imbued with the scent of Thomas Bernhard. And on the other side of this coin is the work of Garielle Lutz with a flat-shock treatment like a sicko gut-punch (totally worth reading). Jean Ray aka, Raymundus Joannes de Kremer, or King Ray, or R. Bantam, or Sailor John, among others, take your pick from his pseudonyms, is somewhere in the middle. By any name, Ray was considered an important writer by people like Raymond Queneau. So where do we situate Ray’s horror stories? Somewhere in the middle of all this, with a voice that is equally odd and sharp, if less archaic and less contemporary than those mentioned. His stories are populated with characters one meets at tattered dockside liquor parlors, who enter dank rooms followed by blasts of cold air, and who, for a couple jiggers of whiskey, will tell you tenebrous tales of the extended kind. This is what you’ll find in Cruise of Shadows: Stories of Land and Sea, (first published in 1931). To be exact, there are 7 stories in all with wonderful translator notes and afterward in this 2019 edition. And here’s another tidbit to get your blood flowing, the notes say that Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.
If you ask whether Jean Ray is worth reading, I’ll answer with a question in return: Do you prefer your brain in a vat? If so, I suspect this means you will enjoy getting all wobbly about reality and truth, consciousness and meaning. In other words, yes. Do you gravitate to the work on nature by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and his idea that within nature there is something nameless and frightful, something lying beneath nature’s peaceful surface that may provoke terror? Then absolutely.
But also head in with an awareness of the fare on the menu. Commotion is made over H. P. Lovecraft and how he less-than-describes the monsters, in order to highlight how the main characters, aka humans, generally cannot comprehend them and science is a poor method for understanding supernatural.
More so than Lovecraft, Ray’s foreboding monsters, things, situations are literal bodies without organs, hovering around like a negative life force, as in Žižek’s characterization of Lacan’s lamella. Zizek writes, “The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can incessantly change its form….an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void — its status is purely phantasmatic.” (In How to Read Lacan, Chapter “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien.”) Writers of horror and weird have long known that the minor writer motto “show don’t tell” holds no real meaning. An explicitly shown monster denies the space that may be filled by viewer fantasy. The 1959 movie The Tingler cuts off such space as soon as the Tingler appears. It comes off as a pasquinade of a lobster-rhinoceros beetle. In most great horror, the trick is not to show but to infer and hint as the means of forcing the reader or viewer to struggle with the reification of the abstract monster.
Graham Harman stirred this pot of this idea in his book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. He’s both right and wrong. In Lovecraft, the Cthulhu is described as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.” A crude drawing of Cthulhu by Lovecraft shows the side view of a sitting chunky scaled merman like form with flattened wings on its back, and a head from which emerges hair like tentacles. Lovecraft was not always leaving his monsters entirely to the reader’s imagination, contrary to current lore. I suspect some of this idea arises from Graham Harman commenting on Lovecraft’s “Nameless Approximations of Form” when he writes “No other writer gives us monsters and cities so difficult to describe that he can only hint at their anomalies,” or in speaking about monsters, each of which “escapes all such definition,” or “Whereas most fictional monsters have definite features and contours, Lovecraft’s most abstract creatures have now become something as vague as the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.” True enough, the Nyarlathotep, in the eponymous story, is “the crawling chaos,” which is in definitive language that won’t pin it down, even if Lovecraft imagined that “crawling chaos” was sufficiently vague. However, we also learn it was swarthy and slender “looked like a Pharoah,” and apparently spoke a lot to people of the sciences. The Nyarlathotep is embodied, and this gives it a description.
Ultimately too, Lovecraft’s humans are not necessarily monstrous but certainly less than human, caricatures of humans who attempt to grasp this ineffable world, a world beyond human measure, that they are thrown into. But by letting the human response slip away, the struggle is diminished, and the unknown becomes superficial. A conspicuous contrast would be any of Tolstoy’s greater characters. I suppose one might also construct a continuum of reality in which M. R. James accepts reality, Ligotti and Lovecraft work hard to disrupt reality with the insertion of the otherworldly, but Jean Ray destabilizes the entire premise of reality.
Thus, Ray’s gambit sacrifices tangible elaboration for hovering lamella, the undead-indestructible, the thing that to use Lacan’s wording is “extra-flat” and yet can come at night, “suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep.” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 197). Whoa, who knew Lacan was also a fledgling horror writer in this sense, I mean beyond the horror that first time Lacan readers experience when first engaging with his super-dense, elliptical work. This is the main difference I read between Lovecraft and Ray. Ray writes, in what can be a reflection on this process of working through movement from tangible to lamella, as he says in one story, “All at once the world of everyday explanations closed off, and only that of supernatural apprehensions remained for us.”
Ray’s stories engage being-toward-death, Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tod, in which the unstated horror of this looming recognition streams through the whiskey sopped recollections. This is the weird throughout the tales, in which things are always less than defined and yet present like a magnetic force. Ray writes, “Listen to it… the absolute apotheosis of the tempest’s wicked roar. It has come in haste from afar, from the depths of the baleful seas. It has stolen away from some accursed shore where seals rot…” What sort of things does Ray discuss, “the end of the street,” “destiny,” “the sound of footsteps,” on nights when “nothing stirred in the air except formaldehyde vapors,” “whimpers of pain,” “the unfeeling abyss of the Unknown,” and a yearning “for things beyond the veil of the absolute.”
In The Mainz Psalter, Jellewyn is told by Friar Tuck of a thing:
“What?” I asked.
“Well, the thing that was watching us from the fissure,” he said foolishly.
“What was that?”
Friar Tuck gave me a furtive look. “I don’t know, and it’s gone.”
Žižek speaks of adding to the Real a third type, “that of a mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable ‘something’ that makes an ordinary object sublime. Poe tried to do this and in particular with the story The Black Cat. Lovecraft wanted to do this, but his heavy-handedness of the phantasmagoric thumped the sublime right out of it. James headed in that direction and was pretty successful, to the point that his story The Casting of the Runes was turned into the movie The Curse of the Demon (1957) directed by Jacques Tourneur, and several others made into a BBC series (all worth watching.) Ray is equally successful and at times rawer than James.
These are nods to the Sein-zum-Tod that propels the weird and makes the stories human. Ray, as the knowing author, captain of this ship of tales, writes, “If a known danger strengthens the authority of the leader, the unknown brings him closer to the level of his men.” What emerges in Ray is that the horror characters feel is inside of them as much as it is outside of them. The forces of evil are not simply exterior, but that the internal fear invents the external, which is the ratified by the perception of the external. As Nick Land writes in Teleoplexy, (in Accelerate# The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanonic, 2014). “It is the prison, and not the prisoner, who speaks.” The horror, as its own inventor of the conditions of horror, holds a position as the “governor,” to use Land’s word. It reinforces the negative of the typical horror story by allowing that this internal and external are homologous. Here Ray’s work shows a bloodline back to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Contrasted with the unnamable and unknowable are stunning, knife-like descriptions. “From a house next door a punctured gutter dispatched a minor cataract to spatter loudly against the pavement.” It’s an intriguing sentence not only for the clamor of consonants, but for the sounds that move from the uh to the ah, ending up on the sole long vowel in pavement. Or try these on for size: “I took two startled hops onto Bérégonnegasse; my hand mechanically broke off a branch of viburnum. It rests on my table.” Or, “One morning when Hellen brought up to my room the bizarre Früstück that she insisted on garnishing with Bismark herring and salted radishes, I caught her by the hem of her nightgown of Bulgarian embroidery.”
All the stories stand out, but two, are particular for their length and involvement. In one, “The Mainz Psalter,” a ship sails, having taken a wrong turn at the prime meridian, floats upon a sea that turns out to be a tropospheric plane of existence above another undersea world with inhabitants who occasionally rise to the surface. The sole survivor tells the story.
To situate Ray’s stories is for me to step outside of literature. They feel most for me like Sergei Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, premiered in Saint Petersburg, 1916, with Prokofiev at the piano. They are filled with energy and contrast, power and gentleness, and, as Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote in his book Music and the Ineffable, filled with “aggressive wrong notes.” Yes, this is beautiful storytelling, with power and contrast, with a wrongness to them that shows the work of a serious writer. But I can let Ray say this even more clearly: “All that, however, is but a parenthesis to this awful story, and here I must beg your pardon.” These are awful stories in the most superb sense, and each will cut a little nick out of your soul.
Where exactly do we situate the weird stories of Jean Ray? Poe’s short stories are brilliantly baroque in their density and for the myriad cogitations of the protagonists. M. R. James, born about 20 years before Jean Ray, but at times his contemporary, borders on the creeps with dead men’s tales and a whistling in the mist. Lovecraft ladles from a bucket of strange brew, as does Thomas Ligotti, the latter imbued with the scent of Thomas Bernhard. And on the other side of this coin is the work of Garielle Lutz with a flat-shock treatment like a sicko gut-punch (totally worth reading). Jean Ray aka, Raymundus Joannes de Kremer, or King Ray, or R. Bantam, or Sailor John, among others, take your pick from his pseudonyms, is somewhere in the middle. By any name, Ray was considered an important writer by people like Raymond Queneau. So where do we situate Ray’s horror stories? Somewhere in the middle of all this, with a voice that is equally odd and sharp, if less archaic and less contemporary than those mentioned. His stories are populated with characters one meets at tattered dockside liquor parlors, who enter dank rooms followed by blasts of cold air, and who, for a couple jiggers of whiskey, will tell you tenebrous tales of the extended kind. This is what you’ll find in Cruise of Shadows: Stories of Land and Sea, (first published in 1931). To be exact, there are 7 stories in all with wonderful translator notes and afterward in this 2019 edition. And here’s another tidbit to get your blood flowing, the notes say that Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.
If you ask whether Jean Ray is worth reading, I’ll answer with a question in return: Do you prefer your brain in a vat? If so, I suspect this means you will enjoy getting all wobbly about reality and truth, consciousness and meaning. In other words, yes. Do you gravitate to the work on nature by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and his idea that within nature there is something nameless and frightful, something lying beneath nature’s peaceful surface that may provoke terror? Then absolutely.
But also head in with an awareness of the fare on the menu. Commotion is made over H. P. Lovecraft and how he less-than-describes the monsters, in order to highlight how the main characters, aka humans, generally cannot comprehend them and science is a poor method for understanding supernatural.
More so than Lovecraft, Ray’s foreboding monsters, things, situations are literal bodies without organs, hovering around like a negative life force, as in Žižek’s characterization of Lacan’s lamella. Zizek writes, “The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can incessantly change its form….an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void — its status is purely phantasmatic.” (In How to Read Lacan, Chapter “Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien.”) Writers of horror and weird have long known that the minor writer motto “show don’t tell” holds no real meaning. An explicitly shown monster denies the space that may be filled by viewer fantasy. The 1959 movie The Tingler cuts off such space as soon as the Tingler appears. It comes off as a pasquinade of a lobster-rhinoceros beetle. In most great horror, the trick is not to show but to infer and hint as the means of forcing the reader or viewer to struggle with the reification of the abstract monster.
Graham Harman stirred this pot of this idea in his book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. He’s both right and wrong. In Lovecraft, the Cthulhu is described as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.” A crude drawing of Cthulhu by Lovecraft shows the side view of a sitting chunky scaled merman like form with flattened wings on its back, and a head from which emerges hair like tentacles. Lovecraft was not always leaving his monsters entirely to the reader’s imagination, contrary to current lore. I suspect some of this idea arises from Graham Harman commenting on Lovecraft’s “Nameless Approximations of Form” when he writes “No other writer gives us monsters and cities so difficult to describe that he can only hint at their anomalies,” or in speaking about monsters, each of which “escapes all such definition,” or “Whereas most fictional monsters have definite features and contours, Lovecraft’s most abstract creatures have now become something as vague as the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.” True enough, the Nyarlathotep, in the eponymous story, is “the crawling chaos,” which is in definitive language that won’t pin it down, even if Lovecraft imagined that “crawling chaos” was sufficiently vague. However, we also learn it was swarthy and slender “looked like a Pharoah,” and apparently spoke a lot to people of the sciences. The Nyarlathotep is embodied, and this gives it a description.
Ultimately too, Lovecraft’s humans are not necessarily monstrous but certainly less than human, caricatures of humans who attempt to grasp this ineffable world, a world beyond human measure, that they are thrown into. But by letting the human response slip away, the struggle is diminished, and the unknown becomes superficial. A conspicuous contrast would be any of Tolstoy’s greater characters. I suppose one might also construct a continuum of reality in which M. R. James accepts reality, Ligotti and Lovecraft work hard to disrupt reality with the insertion of the otherworldly, but Jean Ray destabilizes the entire premise of reality.
Thus, Ray’s gambit sacrifices tangible elaboration for hovering lamella, the undead-indestructible, the thing that to use Lacan’s wording is “extra-flat” and yet can come at night, “suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep.” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 197). Whoa, who knew Lacan was also a fledgling horror writer in this sense, I mean beyond the horror that first time Lacan readers experience when first engaging with his super-dense, elliptical work. This is the main difference I read between Lovecraft and Ray. Ray writes, in what can be a reflection on this process of working through movement from tangible to lamella, as he says in one story, “All at once the world of everyday explanations closed off, and only that of supernatural apprehensions remained for us.”
Ray’s stories engage being-toward-death, Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tod, in which the unstated horror of this looming recognition streams through the whiskey sopped recollections. This is the weird throughout the tales, in which things are always less than defined and yet present like a magnetic force. Ray writes, “Listen to it… the absolute apotheosis of the tempest’s wicked roar. It has come in haste from afar, from the depths of the baleful seas. It has stolen away from some accursed shore where seals rot…” What sort of things does Ray discuss, “the end of the street,” “destiny,” “the sound of footsteps,” on nights when “nothing stirred in the air except formaldehyde vapors,” “whimpers of pain,” “the unfeeling abyss of the Unknown,” and a yearning “for things beyond the veil of the absolute.”
In The Mainz Psalter, Jellewyn is told by Friar Tuck of a thing:
“What?” I asked.
“Well, the thing that was watching us from the fissure,” he said foolishly.
“What was that?”
Friar Tuck gave me a furtive look. “I don’t know, and it’s gone.”
Žižek speaks of adding to the Real a third type, “that of a mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable ‘something’ that makes an ordinary object sublime. Poe tried to do this and in particular with the story The Black Cat. Lovecraft wanted to do this, but his heavy-handedness of the phantasmagoric thumped the sublime right out of it. James headed in that direction and was pretty successful, to the point that his story The Casting of the Runes was turned into the movie The Curse of the Demon (1957) directed by Jacques Tourneur, and several others made into a BBC series (all worth watching.) Ray is equally successful and at times rawer than James.
These are nods to the Sein-zum-Tod that propels the weird and makes the stories human. Ray, as the knowing author, captain of this ship of tales, writes, “If a known danger strengthens the authority of the leader, the unknown brings him closer to the level of his men.” What emerges in Ray is that the horror characters feel is inside of them as much as it is outside of them. The forces of evil are not simply exterior, but that the internal fear invents the external, which is the ratified by the perception of the external. As Nick Land writes in Teleoplexy, (in Accelerate# The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanonic, 2014). “It is the prison, and not the prisoner, who speaks.” The horror, as its own inventor of the conditions of horror, holds a position as the “governor,” to use Land’s word. It reinforces the negative of the typical horror story by allowing that this internal and external are homologous. Here Ray’s work shows a bloodline back to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Contrasted with the unnamable and unknowable are stunning, knife-like descriptions. “From a house next door a punctured gutter dispatched a minor cataract to spatter loudly against the pavement.” It’s an intriguing sentence not only for the clamor of consonants, but for the sounds that move from the uh to the ah, ending up on the sole long vowel in pavement. Or try these on for size: “I took two startled hops onto Bérégonnegasse; my hand mechanically broke off a branch of viburnum. It rests on my table.” Or, “One morning when Hellen brought up to my room the bizarre Früstück that she insisted on garnishing with Bismark herring and salted radishes, I caught her by the hem of her nightgown of Bulgarian embroidery.”
All the stories stand out, but two, are particular for their length and involvement. In one, “The Mainz Psalter,” a ship sails, having taken a wrong turn at the prime meridian, floats upon a sea that turns out to be a tropospheric plane of existence above another undersea world with inhabitants who occasionally rise to the surface. The sole survivor tells the story.
To situate Ray’s stories is for me to step outside of literature. They feel most for me like Sergei Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, premiered in Saint Petersburg, 1916, with Prokofiev at the piano. They are filled with energy and contrast, power and gentleness, and, as Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote in his book Music and the Ineffable, filled with “aggressive wrong notes.” Yes, this is beautiful storytelling, with power and contrast, with a wrongness to them that shows the work of a serious writer. But I can let Ray say this even more clearly: “All that, however, is but a parenthesis to this awful story, and here I must beg your pardon.” These are awful stories in the most superb sense, and each will cut a little nick out of your soul.
June 25, 2025
Amazing collection of short stories by the incredibly atmospheric Jean Ray. I especially loved the two longer stories at the end of the book, The Mainz Psalter and The Gloomy Alley. All of the stories were very interesting though, all of them containing some evil presence beyond our understanding, this is cosmic horror at its best.
June 6, 2020
This is one I’d have to read again. A few of the stories jump around erratically. Not sure if from the translation from French or the author’s style. The translator’s notes and afterward are helpful and fill in gaps.
These are a style of story I typically enjoy. The Mainz Psalter was the standout. 3/5
These are a style of story I typically enjoy. The Mainz Psalter was the standout. 3/5
July 13, 2021
Starts out good, interesting. Then the last two stories are absolute classics. Excited to read more by Jean Ray. Good companion to other sort of Lovecraftian / weird stories. Gave me some of that good Machen feel, and King in Yellow too.
Next up is Circles of Dread.
Next up is Circles of Dread.
August 15, 2023
The Belgian School of the Strange. Sounds a bit like the Birmingham School of Business. Something that might exist, probably should exist but seems more like a line from a Mark E Smith song. But it DOES exist apparently. And Jean Ray is his leading exponent. And it has a school of acolytes to go with it. And a publishing house interested in picking up the zlotys.
So. Jean Ray. Out of the Theatre of Grunge before it was the Theatre of Grunge (copyright Stonehouse Plymouth Liggers Anonymous Territory (SPLAT!)). Born Flemish in 1887. Flunked out of university. Clerical jobs in writing till caught with his fingers in the till and given 4 years of which he served two. During his time in the chokey he wrote. Continued writing thereafter in various forms. Almost on the brink of success often (but not quite). Now a bit of a cult writer given his take up by the Weird Tales mob. This edition brand new is from Wakefield Press (out of Amurrikay), promoters of ‘The Belgian School of the Strange' and translated by acolyte Scott Nicolay. Short stories. Stuff you’d find in Weird Tales or any fanzine or darn the local Writers Group. All macabre but in some way derivative with a few exceptions.
Now I’ve got a bit of a problem with a genre like this. To me, a logical positive realist living in the world of science, politics and economics, these ‘fantasies’ on the supernatural all seem somewhat adolescent. It all seems like a bunch of naïfs recounting their misunderstood tidings of wormholes and rifts in the fabric of space-time to explain phenomena more easily understood through psychotherapy and hysteria as hallucination. These masters of the esoteric have their own language (as any decent cult worth calling itself one has). It doesn’t matter if that cult is IVth form rebellious goths, yoga-ists, or religionists covering the whole spectrum from Buddhists to Christians and the Black and White Magic Show-ers. It’s the Esoteric that grabs them (though some might argue that Theists are mainstream). So you can keep yer Chi, chakrarse, Holy Blood and Holy Grail, Nirvana, Reincarnation and all that clutter of bollocks propping up the escape from reality which is Existential Angst. Anything to get you away from that beastie! The Flying Dutchman is the mariner’s own trope of this – along with not whistling or mentioning rabbits or renaming a boat. There are lots of those memes in these short stories. All these superstitions and referrals from the black mind of the id stand against the fear of the Abyss. And all these tales are exactly about the fear of the Black Abyss. As such they are all attempts to plug into the recursive dreams of our own id. A play on our own existential doubt. That there must be some other plane of existence beyond what we can experience.
A nice Romantic Dream. In fact many times I was put in mind of the work of arch German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. Solid; arch-German Romanticism aligned with the Brocken Spectre and that whole Walpurgis Nacht stuff.
But what of the stories? Well they’re all pretty decently written full of cozmic ideas gleaned from all over the place. Generally the writing itself is good if somewhat repetitive – though I suppose that goes with the territory – playing on fairly common fears. The stranger entering a tavern on a storm-tossed night (as bald as a river cobble - a choice superb simile), ‘hauntings’, the stranger (again) appearing at the end of a life lived well, the passage to oblivion which is Death, the showy boast of a blagger, being found out, the unknown and unknowing and unknowable, disappearance one-by-one, the ‘special one’ who is the only one who can see. Generally all are well-written but the best is without doubt The Mainz Psalter. Longer than the rest and multi-stranded, a real mariners tale invoking Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft, Melville among many (for me it reminded me of a crafted piece of G.K. Chesterton). A superb short story.
Beyond that is the translator’s ephemera. Not content with ‘translating’ the work to give not just the meaning of the words but the gist of thought by the author behind the words (as any half-decent translator should do), Scott Nicolay believes it’s his right to give us HIS take on the short stories that have preceded. Its like a PhD student pleading before his Viva examiners on why his thesis has failed but really it shouldn’t have. On the other hand I have heard ‘zine’ writers doing similar explanations along the lines of why their work is groundbreaking and a literary achievement. It’s a bit tedious. And hagiographic. And pretentious enough to make you disbelieve the lot.
Even given all the Translator stuff at the end I was left not knowing what is so special about either the Belgian School of the Strange or why Jean Ray’s fiction stands out. It seems to me that a lot of this ground is covered far better in the work of mainstream writers some of whom are name checked. But where’s the references to Borges, or Kafka, or even Grass?
So by all means give this a whirl. And take it for what it is. Then go and read some more Borges.
And not one mention of Aleister Crowley.
So. Jean Ray. Out of the Theatre of Grunge before it was the Theatre of Grunge (copyright Stonehouse Plymouth Liggers Anonymous Territory (SPLAT!)). Born Flemish in 1887. Flunked out of university. Clerical jobs in writing till caught with his fingers in the till and given 4 years of which he served two. During his time in the chokey he wrote. Continued writing thereafter in various forms. Almost on the brink of success often (but not quite). Now a bit of a cult writer given his take up by the Weird Tales mob. This edition brand new is from Wakefield Press (out of Amurrikay), promoters of ‘The Belgian School of the Strange' and translated by acolyte Scott Nicolay. Short stories. Stuff you’d find in Weird Tales or any fanzine or darn the local Writers Group. All macabre but in some way derivative with a few exceptions.
Now I’ve got a bit of a problem with a genre like this. To me, a logical positive realist living in the world of science, politics and economics, these ‘fantasies’ on the supernatural all seem somewhat adolescent. It all seems like a bunch of naïfs recounting their misunderstood tidings of wormholes and rifts in the fabric of space-time to explain phenomena more easily understood through psychotherapy and hysteria as hallucination. These masters of the esoteric have their own language (as any decent cult worth calling itself one has). It doesn’t matter if that cult is IVth form rebellious goths, yoga-ists, or religionists covering the whole spectrum from Buddhists to Christians and the Black and White Magic Show-ers. It’s the Esoteric that grabs them (though some might argue that Theists are mainstream). So you can keep yer Chi, chakrarse, Holy Blood and Holy Grail, Nirvana, Reincarnation and all that clutter of bollocks propping up the escape from reality which is Existential Angst. Anything to get you away from that beastie! The Flying Dutchman is the mariner’s own trope of this – along with not whistling or mentioning rabbits or renaming a boat. There are lots of those memes in these short stories. All these superstitions and referrals from the black mind of the id stand against the fear of the Abyss. And all these tales are exactly about the fear of the Black Abyss. As such they are all attempts to plug into the recursive dreams of our own id. A play on our own existential doubt. That there must be some other plane of existence beyond what we can experience.
A nice Romantic Dream. In fact many times I was put in mind of the work of arch German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. Solid; arch-German Romanticism aligned with the Brocken Spectre and that whole Walpurgis Nacht stuff.
But what of the stories? Well they’re all pretty decently written full of cozmic ideas gleaned from all over the place. Generally the writing itself is good if somewhat repetitive – though I suppose that goes with the territory – playing on fairly common fears. The stranger entering a tavern on a storm-tossed night (as bald as a river cobble - a choice superb simile), ‘hauntings’, the stranger (again) appearing at the end of a life lived well, the passage to oblivion which is Death, the showy boast of a blagger, being found out, the unknown and unknowing and unknowable, disappearance one-by-one, the ‘special one’ who is the only one who can see. Generally all are well-written but the best is without doubt The Mainz Psalter. Longer than the rest and multi-stranded, a real mariners tale invoking Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft, Melville among many (for me it reminded me of a crafted piece of G.K. Chesterton). A superb short story.
Beyond that is the translator’s ephemera. Not content with ‘translating’ the work to give not just the meaning of the words but the gist of thought by the author behind the words (as any half-decent translator should do), Scott Nicolay believes it’s his right to give us HIS take on the short stories that have preceded. Its like a PhD student pleading before his Viva examiners on why his thesis has failed but really it shouldn’t have. On the other hand I have heard ‘zine’ writers doing similar explanations along the lines of why their work is groundbreaking and a literary achievement. It’s a bit tedious. And hagiographic. And pretentious enough to make you disbelieve the lot.
Even given all the Translator stuff at the end I was left not knowing what is so special about either the Belgian School of the Strange or why Jean Ray’s fiction stands out. It seems to me that a lot of this ground is covered far better in the work of mainstream writers some of whom are name checked. But where’s the references to Borges, or Kafka, or even Grass?
So by all means give this a whirl. And take it for what it is. Then go and read some more Borges.
And not one mention of Aleister Crowley.
January 26, 2021
In the afterward to Cruise of Shadows, Nicolay charts the evolution of Ray’s writing from the early flash fiction of Whiskey Tales to the more developed and complex novellas that mark the best of Cruise of Shadows. He also discusses the environment in which Ray lived as he composed the stories that make up that second collection, published in 1932 as La Croisière des ombres. Just one year after the publication of Les contes du whiskey, Jean Ray was charged with embezzlement and sentenced to six years in prison. Though he served only two of those years in a relatively comfortable facility, the imprisonment had influences on his stories and his development as a writer. Nicolay’s discussion of these is placed after the stories proper to avoid any spoilers.
With seven stories, Cruise of Shadows has a big drop in story quantity compared to Ray’s first collection, but that becomes far exceeded by quality. The first five are well developed short stories, with the final of those considered by many to be masterpiece. The two novellas that follow are likewise considered among the best work that Ray composed. I still have much to read by Ray, but I can certainly agree that these here are all excellent.
Most reviewers have commented on the second of these novellas, “The Mainz Psalter”. Considering this has been frequently anthologized (though with portions omitted) and that it bears resemblance to a story by Lovecraft makes this understandable. (Apparently the similarities to “The Call of Cthulhu” must be coincidental, as the timing of its availability to Ray does not coincide with Ray’s composition of this.)
I found the first novella, “The Gloomy Alley”, to be more interesting. (Again, less Lovecraftian, which maybe made me enjoy it more). It serves as a prime example of Ray’s story-within-story structure as a man discovers two journals while going through waste material by the docks. One journal is written in German, and the other in French. We are then given the translations of these texts, separate – but connected – weird tales of people disappearing, monsters, and odd shifts in space/time. The story also features a defining element of Ray’s writing that I haven’t yet touched upon: code-switching.
Ray writes fairly conversationally, so the voice has alterations in word usage between classes. But he also fills the words of his characters and their narration with pervasive name-dropping, both real and invented. Characters refer to people who otherwise don’t appear in a story, but who – like that no-good Bobby Moos above – pop up as characters in other stories. They speak of cities, streets, shops, etc., and in a cosmopolitan, European manner that switches frequently between languages. This portion of “The Gloomy Alley” illustrates this switch in languages (while also introducing the street that seems to only exist in space for the narrator:
“I received directions to the city’s oldest coachman, in the smoky kneipe where he drinks Octoberfest beer, heady and fragrant.
I offered him drinks, then some saffron tobacco and a Dutch daalder; he swore that I was a prince. “Most certainly a prince,” he shouted. “What could be more noble than a prince? Bring them on, all those who disagree: I will bind them with the business end of my whip!”
I pointed to his droschke, as large as a small waiting room.
“Take me now to the blind alley Sainte-Bérégonne.”
He regarded me at first with a look of powerful bewilderment, then erupted into a hearty laugh.
“Oh, you are a fine one! A Fine Fellow!”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re putting me to the test. I know every street in this city. Did I say street? … Nay, the very cobbles! There is no street Sainte-Béré… what was it again?”
“Bérégonne. Tell me, is it not beside the Mühlenstrassse?”
“No,” he said in a tone of finality, “such a street no more exists here than Vesuvius in St. Petersburg.”
No one knew more about the city in its most tortuous recesses than this magnificent drinker of beer.
A Student who was writing a love letter at a nearby table and overheard us, interjected:
“There is no saint by that name either.”
And the owner’s wife added angrily:
“One cannot simply manufacture the names of saints like Jewish sausages.”
I calmed everyone with wine and new beer and a great joy dwelt in my heart.”
And, of course, Ray has not lost his inclusion of alcoholic beverage to accompany the tale. I found it difficult to not read Whiskey Tales or Cruise of Shadows without having a sifter beside me to sip along with these haunted tales. I’m looking forward to getting the later volumes of Nicolay’s translation of Ray’s work from Wakefield Press.
From my review of WHISKEY TALES and CRUISE OF SHADOWS for Speculative Fiction in Translation
With seven stories, Cruise of Shadows has a big drop in story quantity compared to Ray’s first collection, but that becomes far exceeded by quality. The first five are well developed short stories, with the final of those considered by many to be masterpiece. The two novellas that follow are likewise considered among the best work that Ray composed. I still have much to read by Ray, but I can certainly agree that these here are all excellent.
Most reviewers have commented on the second of these novellas, “The Mainz Psalter”. Considering this has been frequently anthologized (though with portions omitted) and that it bears resemblance to a story by Lovecraft makes this understandable. (Apparently the similarities to “The Call of Cthulhu” must be coincidental, as the timing of its availability to Ray does not coincide with Ray’s composition of this.)
I found the first novella, “The Gloomy Alley”, to be more interesting. (Again, less Lovecraftian, which maybe made me enjoy it more). It serves as a prime example of Ray’s story-within-story structure as a man discovers two journals while going through waste material by the docks. One journal is written in German, and the other in French. We are then given the translations of these texts, separate – but connected – weird tales of people disappearing, monsters, and odd shifts in space/time. The story also features a defining element of Ray’s writing that I haven’t yet touched upon: code-switching.
Ray writes fairly conversationally, so the voice has alterations in word usage between classes. But he also fills the words of his characters and their narration with pervasive name-dropping, both real and invented. Characters refer to people who otherwise don’t appear in a story, but who – like that no-good Bobby Moos above – pop up as characters in other stories. They speak of cities, streets, shops, etc., and in a cosmopolitan, European manner that switches frequently between languages. This portion of “The Gloomy Alley” illustrates this switch in languages (while also introducing the street that seems to only exist in space for the narrator:
“I received directions to the city’s oldest coachman, in the smoky kneipe where he drinks Octoberfest beer, heady and fragrant.
I offered him drinks, then some saffron tobacco and a Dutch daalder; he swore that I was a prince. “Most certainly a prince,” he shouted. “What could be more noble than a prince? Bring them on, all those who disagree: I will bind them with the business end of my whip!”
I pointed to his droschke, as large as a small waiting room.
“Take me now to the blind alley Sainte-Bérégonne.”
He regarded me at first with a look of powerful bewilderment, then erupted into a hearty laugh.
“Oh, you are a fine one! A Fine Fellow!”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re putting me to the test. I know every street in this city. Did I say street? … Nay, the very cobbles! There is no street Sainte-Béré… what was it again?”
“Bérégonne. Tell me, is it not beside the Mühlenstrassse?”
“No,” he said in a tone of finality, “such a street no more exists here than Vesuvius in St. Petersburg.”
No one knew more about the city in its most tortuous recesses than this magnificent drinker of beer.
A Student who was writing a love letter at a nearby table and overheard us, interjected:
“There is no saint by that name either.”
And the owner’s wife added angrily:
“One cannot simply manufacture the names of saints like Jewish sausages.”
I calmed everyone with wine and new beer and a great joy dwelt in my heart.”
And, of course, Ray has not lost his inclusion of alcoholic beverage to accompany the tale. I found it difficult to not read Whiskey Tales or Cruise of Shadows without having a sifter beside me to sip along with these haunted tales. I’m looking forward to getting the later volumes of Nicolay’s translation of Ray’s work from Wakefield Press.
From my review of WHISKEY TALES and CRUISE OF SHADOWS for Speculative Fiction in Translation
October 10, 2024
The Horrifying Presence"
Was an ok first short story.. Nice atmosphere but the story just ends all of a sudden. **
"The End of the Street"
Much better than the first story, basically its all about the mystery:what is on the Endimion? Nice poetic ending with a good allegory for death. ***
"The Last Guest"
Loved the setting of a hotel at the end of the season. Big place, empty.. Its always spooky. The atmosphere is great ***
"Dürer, the Idiot"
Good story, essentially left open to interpretation if the narator is insane or its true. ***
"Mondschein-Dampfer"
Very different than the others. Didnt like it that much.. Its really out of place in this collection...kinda pointless due to the overarching theme of the stories. **
"The Gloomy Alley"
Best one of the bunch. The first part is amazing. The second one very good.
The first "haunted house" story is spooky, atmospheric and mysterious.
Second one is very eventful and tense, really like how it plays out. ****
"The Mainz Psalter"
Liked it a lot. Even though i felt its kinda pointless? With no proper resolution.
Amazingly haunting description at times. Love the sudden realization by the characters that they are in a different world. It was very sudden which adds to the mystery and fright that the characters feel. ****
Was an ok first short story.. Nice atmosphere but the story just ends all of a sudden. **
"The End of the Street"
Much better than the first story, basically its all about the mystery:what is on the Endimion? Nice poetic ending with a good allegory for death. ***
"The Last Guest"
Loved the setting of a hotel at the end of the season. Big place, empty.. Its always spooky. The atmosphere is great ***
"Dürer, the Idiot"
Good story, essentially left open to interpretation if the narator is insane or its true. ***
"Mondschein-Dampfer"
Very different than the others. Didnt like it that much.. Its really out of place in this collection...kinda pointless due to the overarching theme of the stories. **
"The Gloomy Alley"
Best one of the bunch. The first part is amazing. The second one very good.
The first "haunted house" story is spooky, atmospheric and mysterious.
Second one is very eventful and tense, really like how it plays out. ****
"The Mainz Psalter"
Liked it a lot. Even though i felt its kinda pointless? With no proper resolution.
Amazingly haunting description at times. Love the sudden realization by the characters that they are in a different world. It was very sudden which adds to the mystery and fright that the characters feel. ****
September 11, 2023
Nakon potpunog oduševljenja romanom Malpertui - kuća zla, obradovalo me je što će se kod nas pojaviti još nešto iz Reovog opusa. Međutim, priče iz ove zbirke su toliko dosadne da sam se jedva održao budnim čitajući ih.
Tek pretposlednja priča u zbirci - "Mračna uličica" - pobudila je moju pažnju i potpunu angažovanost nad tekstom, jer me vrlo podsetila atmosferom na "Number 13" M.R. Džejmsa.
Poslednja priča "Psaltir iz Majnca" je, takođe, vredna pažnje (doduše, za mene manje nego "Mračna uličica").
Ostatak iz sadržaja je reviše učmao. Reov stil jeste razbokoren, i prevodilac je učinio pitkim čitanje, ali ni traga one zamršenosti što je "Malpertui" donela.
Tek pretposlednja priča u zbirci - "Mračna uličica" - pobudila je moju pažnju i potpunu angažovanost nad tekstom, jer me vrlo podsetila atmosferom na "Number 13" M.R. Džejmsa.
Poslednja priča "Psaltir iz Majnca" je, takođe, vredna pažnje (doduše, za mene manje nego "Mračna uličica").
Ostatak iz sadržaja je reviše učmao. Reov stil jeste razbokoren, i prevodilac je učinio pitkim čitanje, ali ni traga one zamršenosti što je "Malpertui" donela.
February 23, 2021
“... туманы, дожди, ланды, дюны, зыбучие пески, вампирические болота, неведомые гавани, моря, не обозначенный на картах, мертвые корабли, сумасшедшие буссоли, тайфуны , мальстремы, подвалы, чердаки, обители бегинок с дьяволом квартиросъемщиком, невидимые улицы, блуждающие могилы, ствол тропического дерева, оживленный разрушительной волей, обезьяны, карлики, инфернальные полишинели, пауки, спектры, гоулы, крысы, средневековые химеры, зомби, убийцы-эктоплазмы, входящие и выходящие через зеркало... Мир Жана Рэя... “Магический гептамерон” несуществующая (или существующая?) книга о входе в запретный, на такой манящий, такой притягательный, такой любезный усталой душе романтика, аристократа, авантюриста и матроса мир АБСОЛЮТНОГО УЖАСА...»
(Евгений Головин, из радиопередачи Finis Mundi, выпуск о Жане Рэ)
(Евгений Головин, из радиопередачи Finis Mundi, выпуск о Жане Рэ)
July 4, 2020
Translator and editor Scott Nicolay, along with the adventurous Wakefield Press, have done the world of Weird Fiction a tremendous service in bringing all of Jean Ray's incomparable work to the English speaking world. The translations are marvelous, capturing the sense of experimentation and strangeness of Ray's style, and the accompanying notes and commentary are truly outstanding, worthy of any of the major academic presses. And the stories themselves! Some of the finest, and most elusive works of Weird Fiction every written, worthy of comparison with Blackwood, Machen, and Hope Hodgson. Nothing short of a milestone.
August 28, 2020
Cruise of Shadows, first published in 1931, contains seven stories from Jean Ray (pen name of Belgian writer Raymond de Kremer), two of novella length. It’s a more substantial work than Whiskey Tales, casting aside the short tales of drunks for longer, more sophisticated stories that feature sharp turns in narrative. At least three of its stories (the final three in the volume: “Mondschein-Dampfer,” “The Gloomy Alley,” and “The Mainz Psalter”) are genuine masterpieces of weird fiction. For my full review, see https://bit.ly/3lrPyQU.
May 11, 2023
A long-needed reissue and retranslation of the Belgian master of Weird Fiction’s second collection of tales. Each of the tales has its own merits, though my favorites continue to be the seabound weirdness of The Mainz Psalter and cosmic terror of The Gloomy Alley (previously translated as The Shadowy Street). Thanks to Scott Nicolay who provided the new translations and has generally spearheaded a push for greater recognition of Ray in the Weird Fiction community. His translator’s afterward is particularly thoughtful. Highly recommended.
December 6, 2023
A pretty nice collection of horror stories. The stories were weird, occasionally surreal, but always in the end too blunt and literal for my taste. A few of them had some poetic and atmospheric moments that I enjoyed -- the quiet loneliness of a resort out of season, or the Sehnsucht of a steamboat on the lake at night -- but these moments were largely extraneous to the main tone and point of the stories.
Favourites: 'The Last Guest', 'Mondschein-Dampfer'
Favourites: 'The Last Guest', 'Mondschein-Dampfer'
July 13, 2025
The excellent translator of Jean Ray's work, Scott Nicolay, provided me this copy as a gift.
Unfortunately, I wasn't as big a fan as I was of City of Unspeakable Fear. Maybe City set up some unfair expectations, but I was anticipating in addition to the weird and disturbing the Dickensian sense of comedy I found in City, and it was lacking here. In terms of individual stories, the opener is easily the most disturbing and strange.
Unfortunately, I wasn't as big a fan as I was of City of Unspeakable Fear. Maybe City set up some unfair expectations, but I was anticipating in addition to the weird and disturbing the Dickensian sense of comedy I found in City, and it was lacking here. In terms of individual stories, the opener is easily the most disturbing and strange.
February 25, 2021
Nicolay's translation felt a little slavish and literal to me, determined to maintain fealty to Ray's literal turns of phrase as opposed to morphing them into something that makes more sense in English and rendering entire paragraphs hard to follow. But "The Shadowy Street" (translated here as "The Gloomy Alley" -- a case in point) remains one of my all-time favorite weird fiction tales.
February 11, 2022
This volume contains some of the finest strange tales stories written by Jean Ray. His stories are filled with cosmic dread and terror, but the settings are very working class or the underworld. Saliors, thieves, and murders make up his cast of characters a million miles away from the stuffy academics that populate the stories of writters like H.P Lovecraft and M.R James
July 19, 2025
Mišljenje o ovoh knjizi mi je baš podijeljeno. Stil je besprekoran ali je naracija u nekim pričama ponekad potpuno zbunjujuća. Kako i sam Dejan Ognjanović kaže "Mračna uličica" i "Psaltir iz Majnca" su remek djela svjetske fantastike i horora. Naročito potonja koja je u Lavkraftovskom maniru. Ostale priče su i tako i tako ali su svakako vrijedne čitanja.
May 30, 2020
A fun collection of cosmic horror short stories. I really enjoyed the narrator's notes. I felt that they added great context not only for the foreign and historical elements, but also for putting the stories in a larger context of other horror stories.
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