{"title":"Jean Ray","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"whiskey-tales-book-jean-ray-9781939663368","title":"Whiskey Tales","description":"\u003cp\u003eOriginally published in French in 1925, \u003ci\u003eWhiskey Tales\u003c\/i\u003e immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887-1964), whose writings in the coming years would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the \"Belgian Poe.\" A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in prison, where he would write some of his best stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomething of a prequel to later collections such as \u003ci\u003eCruise of Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e or \u003ci\u003eCircles of Terror\u003c\/i\u003e (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), \u003ci\u003eWhiskey Tales\u003c\/i\u003e finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard. Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA handful of these stories first appeared in English in \u003ci\u003eWeird Tales\u003c\/i\u003e in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49853061464337,"sku":"CIN1939663369G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50932726726929,"sku":"CIN1939663369VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51833658573073,"sku":"GOR014417854","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1939663369.jpg?v=1751062652"},{"product_id":"ghouls-in-my-grave-rare-book-jean-ray-1711382294cab","title":"Ghouls In My Grave","description":"1965. Berkley Medallion Edition. 143 pages. Pictorial paper covers. Minor foxing and moderate tanning to pages. Much heavier and more prominent to text block edges and reverse of covers. Hinges are vi","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50087651246353,"sku":"1711382294CAB","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1711382294CAB_1.jpg?v=1722930598"},{"product_id":"cruise-of-shadows-book-jean-ray-9781939663443","title":"Cruise of Shadows","description":"Footsteps in an abandoned holiday resort as the cold weather settles in; 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. 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 of a universe adjacent to this one, 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, 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. It has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, 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.\u003cbr\u003eAlternately referred to as the Belgian Poe and the Flemish Jack London, \u003cb\u003eJean Ray\u003c\/b\u003e (1887 1964) delivered tales 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50316508234001,"sku":"CIN193966344XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50990732247313,"sku":"NIN9781939663443","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52392032796945,"sku":"CIN193966344XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/193966344X.jpg?v=1751157239"},{"product_id":"malpertuis-book-jean-ray-9780947757984","title":"Malpertuis","description":"ne of the most famous gothic\/uncanny novels of 20th century French writing, Ray's work has been compared to the best of Lovecraft and Meyrink and has never been out of print since its first publication in 1943. The author was a man surrounded by as much mystery as the bizarre old mansion of Malpertuis where the insane and horrific events of this novel ineluctably unfold. Fellow writer, Thomas Owen, said of him: Jean Ray was a Gothic personality. He had about him a touch of the damned priest or the cathedral gargoyle.'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50406268010769,"sku":"GOR006334327","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50980620009745,"sku":"GOR004046409","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0947757988.jpg?v=1750820090"},{"product_id":"city-of-unspeakable-fear-book-jean-ray-9781939663900","title":"The City of Unspeakable Fear","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMiss Marple meets H.P. Lovecraft in Ray's genre-defying tale of ghostly intrigue and murder\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished in occupied Belgium in 1943 a few months after his celebrated novel \u003ci\u003eMalpertuis\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe City of Unspeakable Fear\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean Ray\u003c\/b\u003e (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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50468903518481,"sku":"CIN1939663903G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51057762140433,"sku":"NIN9781939663900","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51833658540305,"sku":"GOR014417853","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1939663903.jpg?v=1751124751"},{"product_id":"malpertuis-book-jean-ray-9781939663702","title":"Malpertuis","description":"The prison-like edifice of a mysterious ancient townhouse and the gloom-laden landscape of Flanders form the backdrop to this intense, unrelenting, but beautifully crafted fantasy by Belgian author Jean Ray. What ghastly message is the slowly dying Cassave (played by Orson Welles in the screen adaptation) trying to bring us? MALPERTIUS is considered one of the greatest Gothic novels ever written.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50478121386257,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50478121910545,"sku":"CIN1939663709G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51793220534545,"sku":"NIN9781939663702","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1939663709.jpg?v=1751029174"},{"product_id":"great-nocturnal-book-jean-ray-9781939663498","title":"The Great Nocturnal","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIn English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories \u003ci\u003eCruise of Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Great Nocturnal\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePublished 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean Ray\u003c\/b\u003e (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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50479789637905,"sku":"CIN1939663490G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51057597022481,"sku":"NIN9781939663498","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53570554102033,"sku":"CIN1939663490VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1939663490.jpg?v=1750868261"},{"product_id":"essai-sur-la-structure-logique-du-code-civil-francais-book-jean-ray-9782329195148","title":"Essai Sur La Structure Logique Du Code Civil Français","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50996452229393,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50996452622609,"sku":"NIN9782329195148","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/2329195141.jpg?v=1751349608"},{"product_id":"circles-of-dread-book-jean-ray-9781939663528","title":"Circles of Dread","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51057573560593,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51057575952657,"sku":"NIN9781939663528","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52966305759505,"sku":"CIN1939663520G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1939663520.jpg?v=1751251212"},{"product_id":"last-canterbury-tales-book-jean-ray-9781962728096","title":"The Last Canterbury Tales","description":"Drawing on British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism and Dickensian humor, Jean Ray's tales mix Catholic mythology with cosmic horror  After 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his 14th-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark, freshly cleansed of their sins. This time it is a new cast of storytellers picking up where the others had left off—a motley crew that includes a Prioress with a taste for executions and a madman who once made the mistake of asking after the Uhu. Also among them is a new listener: Tobias Weep, secretary of the Upper Thames Book Club, who has stumbled onto their impossible gathering, pinned to his chair by the impossible weight of E.T.A. Hoffmann's talking tomcat on his lap. Jean Ray's The Last Canterbury Tales, first published in French in 1944, makes no pretense of finishing Chaucer's masterpiece but instead works toward a denouement of its own that reveals an unexpected act of storytelling underpinning this collection. 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,\" he authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, along with his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51883497881873,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51883498307857,"sku":"NGR9781962728096","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53500545007889,"sku":"NIN9781962728096","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53595785265425,"sku":"NLS9781962728096","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781962728096.jpg?v=1754518693"},{"product_id":"autism-parenting-guide-book-jean-ray-9798281774901","title":"Autism Parenting Guide","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53659886682385,"sku":"NIN9798281774901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798281774901.jpg?v=1781432156"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-jean-ray.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}