This turned out to be harder than I would have liked. I decided I would seek out more of his fiction. They were tales of cosmic horror of immense power and imagination. I first read Ray’s fiction in the doorstopper anthology The Weird by Jeff and Anne VanderMeer which reprinted his stories “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Street.” Reading these stories, I felt like I did when I first read Lovecraft. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, and Guy de Maussapant. These are stories of Jean Ray, who was known as “The Belgian Poe.” Other writers he was similar to are H. The greatest detective in the world battles a monster of unknown origin under the streets of London. A house in Hamburg is besieged by invisible forces. Review Quotes Each line in Malpertuis is wrung of all its worth, with most sentences carrying a literal, metaphorical, allegorical, and mystical weight.A ship sails into another dimension. 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. 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 novels structure, one that turns the haunted-house tradition on its head and culminates in an apocalyptic denouement. 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. 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. Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery. Book Synopsis 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. 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. About the Book 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.
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