Description

Cruise of Shadows by Jean Ray

Trade Paperback – Wakefield Press – Dec 2019 – 205 pages

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 embezzlement, 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 what has come to be known as 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 Gloomy Alley.”