July 8th is the birthday of “the Belgian Poe,” Jean Ray. I have written something for his birthday in a (perhaps quixotic) quest to bring attention to him for a couple of years. This year I decided to write out an overview of his works available in English.
Read MoreRay was a major of the Belgian School of the Strange. He is considered a Francophone equivalent to Poe or Lovecraft. Poe was undoubtedly an influence. Ray was a contemporary of Lovecraft, as translations of his stories, under the pseudonym John Flanders, were published in Weird Tales.
Read MoreKnown as the “Belgian Poe,” Jean Ray’s work is often suffused with a sense of dread. 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.
Read MoreJean Ray, known as the Belgian Poe, was born today in 1887. I have written about Ray before, particularly in my essay, The Weird Fiction of Jean Ray. This essay contains a short biography and reviews of Ray’s works that were available in English at the time. Since then Wakefield press has released two more works by Ray, The Great Nocturnal and Circles of Dread, and plans to release more.
Read MoreIt appears again and again in horror fiction: The lost journal detailing the events of the story. While there are plenty of good horror stories that are written in third person, many of the best are written in the first person. More interesting is when such novels use multiple forms of media with multiple narrators to tell the story. The media might be journal entries, letters, or even newspaper reports. I will look at three examples: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” and Jean Ray’s Malpertuis.
Read MoreIn the second part of Matthew Ilseman’s exploration of horror stories set at sea, he reviews tales by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Jean Ray.
Read MoreA ship sails into another dimension. A house in Hamburg is besieged by invisible forces. The greatest detective in the world battles a monster of unknown origin under the streets of London. These are stories of Jean Ray, who was known as “The Belgian Poe.” Other writers he was similar to are H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, and Guy de Maussapant.
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