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.

Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887-1964), whose writings in the coming years would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the "e;Belgian Poe."e; A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in prison, where he would write some of his best stories.Something of a prequel to later collections such as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard. Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined.A handful of these stories first appeared in English in Weird Tales in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.

Footsteps in an abandoned holiday resort as the cold weather settles in; 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. 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 of a universe adjacent to this one, 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 embezzling funds for his literary magazine, 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 the Belgian School of the Strange. It has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, though it contains some of Ray's most anthologized and celebrated stories, including two of his best known, "e;The Mainz Psalter"e; and "e;The Shadowy Alley."e; This is the book's first English translation, and the second of the volumes of Ray's books to be published by Wakefield Press.Alternately referred to as the "e;Belgian Poe"e; and the "e;Flemish Jack London,"e; Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the "e;Belgian School of the Strange,"e; Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird taleAfter the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal.Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray's personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher's monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kummel and keep watch over a deceased woman's apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader's expectations as they do with their characters.Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the "e;Belgian Poe"e; and the "e;Flemish Jack London,"e; Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.

Wartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise of Shadows and progenitor of the "e;Belgian School of the Strange"e;During the Occupation, severed from contact with France and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray's short stories found a new audience during World War II, and gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a distinctly bourgeois everyday.Circles of Dread, Ray's fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection's portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as "e;The Marlyweck Cemetery,"e; "e;The Inn of the Specters"e; and "e;The Story of the Wulkh."e; Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Gotz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate and the shifting, extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery.Alternately referred to as the "e;Belgian Poe"e; and the "e;Flemish Jack London,"e; Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of Dickens and Chaucer. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice and a Chicago gangster in fact covered over a more prosaic existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales.

Jean Ray brilliantly upends the haunted-house tradition in this widely acclaimed puzzlebox of a novelA 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.Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery. 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. 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.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 novel's structure, one that turns the haunted-house tradition on its head and culminates in an apocalyptic denouement.Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer, a pivotal figure in the "e;Belgian School of the Strange,"e; who authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.

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.

Malpertuis es la obra maestra de Jean Ray, el gran fabulador belga del siglo XX, conocido como el «Poe belga» y el «Jack London flamenco». He aquí una reinvención de la novela gótica y un clásico de culto de la literatura fantástica que sigue siendo tan ingeniosa y apasionante hoy como cuando se publicó por primera vez en francés en el oscuro año de 1943.En esta novela inclasificable, lo gótico se funde con lo mitológico, y lo fantástico irrumpe en lo cotidiano con una elegancia inquietante. La mansión de Malpertuis, escenario central del relato, alberga una red de secretos que desafían la razón: un testamento imposible, criaturas que no envejecen, pasillos donde la lógica se quiebra, y presencias antiguas que se niegan a morir.Entre la pesadilla y la fábula, entre la locura y la eternidad, Malpertuis sigue siendo una advertencia: no toda casa es un refugio. Algunas, como ésta, son trampas tejidas por los dioses para no ser olvidados. Esta edición definitiva presenta una nueva traducción fiel al tono original, recuperando la riqueza estilística y el aliento mitológico que hicieron de Malpertuis una obra de culto.«Malpertuis es una obra fundamental de la literatura fantástica del siglo XX. Por su atmósfera, su construcción, el estilo de escritura de Jean Ray y la inquietud que transmite, la novela se alza como un titán del género».Hervé Aubert, Le Mag du Ciné«Cuando las nubes de la incertidumbre finalmente se disipan al final de la novela y se revela la raison d''être de Malpertuis, el desenlace es sencillamente majestuoso. Una resolución impresionante que absorbe todo lo anterior y deja a su paso un cráter del que muchos escritores aún están tratando de salir. Un cráter que dice, desafiante: "Jean Ray llegó aquí primero"».Robert Davidson, The Quietus«Las páginas de Ray están llenas de imágenes grotescas, maldad sobrenatural, crueldad y terror».Richard Davenport-Hines, The Times Literary Supplement

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.

Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887-1964), whose writings in the coming years would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the "e;Belgian Poe."e; A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in prison, where he would write some of his best stories.Something of a prequel to later collections such as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard. Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined.A handful of these stories first appeared in English in Weird Tales in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.

Footsteps in an abandoned holiday resort as the cold weather settles in; 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. 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 of a universe adjacent to this one, 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 embezzling funds for his literary magazine, 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 the Belgian School of the Strange. It has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, though it contains some of Ray's most anthologized and celebrated stories, including two of his best known, "e;The Mainz Psalter"e; and "e;The Shadowy Alley."e; This is the book's first English translation, and the second of the volumes of Ray's books to be published by Wakefield Press.Alternately referred to as the "e;Belgian Poe"e; and the "e;Flemish Jack London,"e; Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the "e;Belgian School of the Strange,"e; Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird taleAfter the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal.Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray's personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher's monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kummel and keep watch over a deceased woman's apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader's expectations as they do with their characters.Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the "e;Belgian Poe"e; and the "e;Flemish Jack London,"e; Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.

Wartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise of Shadows and progenitor of the "e;Belgian School of the Strange"e;During the Occupation, severed from contact with France and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray's short stories found a new audience during World War II, and gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a distinctly bourgeois everyday.Circles of Dread, Ray's fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection's portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as "e;The Marlyweck Cemetery,"e; "e;The Inn of the Specters"e; and "e;The Story of the Wulkh."e; Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Gotz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate and the shifting, extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery.Alternately referred to as the "e;Belgian Poe"e; and the "e;Flemish Jack London,"e; Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of Dickens and Chaucer. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice and a Chicago gangster in fact covered over a more prosaic existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales.

Jean Ray brilliantly upends the haunted-house tradition in this widely acclaimed puzzlebox of a novelA 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.Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery. 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. 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.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 novel's structure, one that turns the haunted-house tradition on its head and culminates in an apocalyptic denouement.Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer, a pivotal figure in the "e;Belgian School of the Strange,"e; who authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime.

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.

Malpertuis es la obra maestra de Jean Ray, el gran fabulador belga del siglo XX, conocido como el «Poe belga» y el «Jack London flamenco». He aquí una reinvención de la novela gótica y un clásico de culto de la literatura fantástica que sigue siendo tan ingeniosa y apasionante hoy como cuando se publicó por primera vez en francés en el oscuro año de 1943.En esta novela inclasificable, lo gótico se funde con lo mitológico, y lo fantástico irrumpe en lo cotidiano con una elegancia inquietante. La mansión de Malpertuis, escenario central del relato, alberga una red de secretos que desafían la razón: un testamento imposible, criaturas que no envejecen, pasillos donde la lógica se quiebra, y presencias antiguas que se niegan a morir.Entre la pesadilla y la fábula, entre la locura y la eternidad, Malpertuis sigue siendo una advertencia: no toda casa es un refugio. Algunas, como ésta, son trampas tejidas por los dioses para no ser olvidados. Esta edición definitiva presenta una nueva traducción fiel al tono original, recuperando la riqueza estilística y el aliento mitológico que hicieron de Malpertuis una obra de culto.«Malpertuis es una obra fundamental de la literatura fantástica del siglo XX. Por su atmósfera, su construcción, el estilo de escritura de Jean Ray y la inquietud que transmite, la novela se alza como un titán del género».Hervé Aubert, Le Mag du Ciné«Cuando las nubes de la incertidumbre finalmente se disipan al final de la novela y se revela la raison d''être de Malpertuis, el desenlace es sencillamente majestuoso. Una resolución impresionante que absorbe todo lo anterior y deja a su paso un cráter del que muchos escritores aún están tratando de salir. Un cráter que dice, desafiante: "Jean Ray llegó aquí primero"».Robert Davidson, The Quietus«Las páginas de Ray están llenas de imágenes grotescas, maldad sobrenatural, crueldad y terror».Richard Davenport-Hines, The Times Literary Supplement