Cruise of Shadows

Book #7 for 2023, continuing “Horror May-hem” with a book that leans more to the modern weird fiction side than the “regular” horror of its day (the stories within all appeared between 1929 and 1931, with the book coming out in 1932), Cruise of Shadows by Jean Ray… or should that be “John Flanders”? Cos that was the name attached to the book on its first appearance, and to the first translations of the stories that appeared in Weird Tales, and it was as much of a pseudonym as “Jean Ray” was… for whatever reason, that seems to be the name by which Raymundus Joannes de Kepler is best known in the Anglophone world, to the extent that he is; for a long time all you could get (if even that) was his novel Malpertuis and a small collection published in the mid-60s. Scott Nicolay and Wakefield Press have happily taken it upon themselves to try and rectify that AND IT WOULD HELP IF THE LATTER MADE THEIR EBOOKS AVAILABLE OUTSIDE THE US SO I COULD ACTUALLY BUY THEM, I MEAN I CAN’T IMAGINE COPYRIGHT BEING AN ISSUE ANY MORE WITH THE LIKES OF LEON BLOY OR MARCEL SCHWOB FOR FUCK’S SAKE um… sorry about that.

Anyway, the book is subtitled “Haunted Stories of Land and Sea”, and its contents stick to that rather less egregiously than those of Whiskey Tales (Ray’s first collection); happily they also lack the somewhat yikes-inducing anti-Semitism of the earlier book too. Land and sea prove, however, to be somewhat complicated issues in some of these tales, most notably the last two, “The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter”. This is a book I suspect may benefit from a re-reading, cos I am, frankly, uncertain of the import of some aspects of it (I found something especially nebulous about “The End of the Street”); whether or not it constitutes Ray’s masterwork as Nicolay’s afterword argues it does is something I’m not yet sure of cos I haven’t read the other available books THAT I HAD TO GET *cough* DUBIOUSLY OBTAINED COPIES OF GODDAMN IT WAKEFIELD PRESS er… yeah. I like this but I don’t know that I love it, and I do think I need to read more Ray to form a judgement.