Jean Ray was born on this day. For those who do not know, he was a Belgian writer who is considered one of the founders of the Belgian School of the Weird. Known as the “Belgian Poe,” his work is often suffused with a sense of dread. He remains unfortunately little known in America, but that seems to be changing with Wakefield Press’s publication of his works. I consider the novel Malpertuis and the story collection Cruise of Shadows to be masterpieces of horror.

While Ray often used traditional motifs like vampires and deals with devil, some rare stories have elements of Cosmic Horror similar but distinct from the work of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, some of the Ray’s works were published in Weird Tales under the name of John Flanders, one of his many pseudonyms. (Jean Ray’s real name was in fact Raymundus Joannes de Kremer.)

“The Strange Studies of Dr. Paukenslager” published in his collection Whiskey Tales may have been the first of his tales to have cosmic themes. While I consider Whiskey Tales, for a variety of reasons, his weakest collection, this story is one of the stronger ones in the book. A journalist encounters Dr. Paukenslager whose invention allows them to see into the fourth dimension. There they find horrible beings that are not described in detail but only hinted at. The story ends with the implication that these beings are watching us. This is the first story Ray would write with cosmic horror elements and what he would term “intercalary worlds.”

By this he means that there are worlds within our own that we do not know about. The fourth dimension in ”Dr. Paukenslager” is one. The titular street from “The Shadowy Street” is another. The story is set in our world but is no less about alien events. The story is told in the form of a found manuscript which relays two accounts, one in French and one German, of different but interrelated events. The first story is of a household that is besieged by invisible and malevolent forces. It is a claustrophobic and harrowing tale in its own right. The second tells of a man who discovers a street which no one but he can see. Being poor, he decides to burgle the houses on the street which seem to be uninhabited. However, he finds out that he is wrong. It becomes apparent that the events of the second story set off those of the first. It is worth noting that each story is by itself a decent tale. However, taken together it is a tale of a world within our own whose inhabitants are malevolent to us. There is a coda at the end that raises questions of what exactly is happening. The sense of forces beyond understanding is strong in this story particularly the first part.

“The Shadowy Street” begins with seemingly mundane events and ends in horror. Ray uses such a progression to disorient the reader and fill them with terror. It is widely seen as one of his trademarks.

These two stories are set in our world, but there are other worlds with ours filled with malevolent beings. The inhabitants of the fourth dimension watch us with loathing. One only has to go down the wrong street in Hamburg to enter another, sinister world.

Then it is there is his story “The Mainz Psalter.” It is a tale of the sea, a subject that fascinated Ray. The plot deals with a chartering of a boat by a mysterious character called the Schoolmaster. The ragtag collection of sailors hired for this have no knowledge of what the purpose of this journey is for or even their final destination. The voyage becomes increasingly strange. An unknown force tries to kill them. The stars in the sky become different from the known constellations. Tentacles rear up from the sea and take one of the crew. Soon, they are forced to face the fact that they have some how sailed into an unknown world.

Ray vividly describes the sense of strangeness and horror of being transported from the world one knows into another hostile one. The story raises more questions then it answers. Where are the sailors? What is the purpose of the journey? What is the true identity of the Schoolmaster?

The story is to some degree an inversion of the first two. Whereas in them the horror of the cosmos is near us unseen and lurking, in “The Mainz Psalter” we see the horror of being thrown out of our world into another.

What links these stories is that they are set in worlds that are not only creepy, but out right hostile. There are beings out to get us whether they are creatures of the fourth dimension, the inhabitants of the Shadowy Street, or the Schoolmaster. They have values that are alien to our own. We do not know why the Schoolmaster wants to travel to another world or why he is willing to sacrifice his crew. While the inhabitants of The Shadowy Street have an actual motive for tormenting humans, they do so far out of proportion to the actual crime.

Then there is “The Grand Nocturne.” This is a tale of a deal with the devil, a theme Ray often used. It is, however, far weirder and more powerful than many such stories by lesser writers. What makes the story powerful is a twist about the true nature of the protagonist. Again malevolent beings exist just outside our reality. The difference between Lovecraft and Ray is that Ray identifies the creature of the title, The Grand Nocturne, as an inhabitant of the Christian Hell while Lovecraft would use a realm of his own making. What makes it cosmic horror is that the protagonist is damned by a being far more powerful than him.

Other stories use more traditional monsters and horrors, and they are often very readable, but Ray is at his best when writing about themes that are more cosmic in scope.