The Great Nocturnal

✍ Scribed by Jean Ray

• Book ID: 112294192
• Publisher: Wakefield Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 108 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781939663771

✦ Synopsis

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale

After 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);...