Jean Ray – författare

He looked up at the picture rail, and there was the hand holding on to a hook with three fingers, and slowly scratching the head of the parrot with the fourth.In 1919, W. F. Harvey published 'The Beast with Five Fingers', his quintessential tale of the disembodied hand with a murderous mind of its own, and its position as one of weird fiction's true classics was cemented by the 1946 film adaptation. Seeking to trace the origins of the haunted hand story back into the nineteenth century, and to showcase its influence on writers of weird fiction from the 1920s to the modern day, horror expert Brian J. Showers presents a new collection of classics from the well-thumbed oeuvres of Sheridan Le Fanu and Guy de Maupassant through to miniature masterpieces from the hands of Jean Ray, Mark Valentine and many more.Featuring ghostly hands, hands possessed by demons and unexplained hands where no hands should be, prepare to enter a world of nightmares run amok as the vice-grip of terror takes hold.

Drawing on British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism and Dickensian humor, Jean Ray's tales mix Catholic mythology with cosmic horrorAfter 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.