Kirjahaku

En este volumen: Los cuentos del whisky, El crucero de las sombras, El gran nocturno, La ciudad del miedo indecible, El libro de los fantasmas.Si no sabe que leer desde que

Wartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise of Shadows and progenitor of the "Belgian School of the Strange"During the Occupation, severed from contact with France and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray's short stories found a new audience during World War II, and gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a distinctly bourgeois everyday. Circles of Dread, Ray's fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection's portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as "The Marlyweck Cemetery," "The Inn of the Specters" and "The Story of the W lkh." Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of G tz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate and the shifting, extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of Dickens and Chaucer. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice and a Chicago gangster in fact covered over a more prosaic existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales.

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

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale After the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal. Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray's personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher's monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish K mmel and keep watch over a deceased woman's apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader's expectations as they do with their characters. Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.

Jean Ray brilliantly upends the haunted-house tradition in this widely acclaimed puzzlebox of a novel A reinvention of the Gothic novel and an established classic of fantastic literature, Malpertuis is as inventive and gripping today as when it first appeared in French in the dark year of 1943. Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery. A bizarre collection of distrustful relatives has gathered together in the ancient stone mansion of a sea-trading dynasty for the impending death of the occult scientist, Uncle Cassave, and the reading of his will. Forced to dwell together for the remainder of their lives within the stifling walls of Malpertuis for the sake of a cursed inheritance, their banal existence gradually gives way to love affairs and secret plots, as the building slowly exposes a malevolence that eventually leads to a series of ghastly deaths. The eccentric personalities it houses--which include an obsessive taxidermist, a hypochondriac, a trio of vengeful sisters and a former paint store manager who has gone mad--begin to shed like skins to reveal yet another hidden story buried in the novel's structure, one that turns the haunted-house tradition on its head and culminates in an apocalyptic denouement. Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer, a pivotal figure in the "Belgian School of the Strange," who authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.