Jean Ray - Ghouls in My Grave

[Johnlprobert]

Jean Ray - Ghouls in My Grave (Berkeley Paperbacks 1965)

Gold Teeth
The Shadowy Street
I Killed Alfred Heavenrock
The Cemetery Watchman
The Mainz Psalter
The Last Traveller
The Black Mirror
Mr Glass Changes Direction

It's time to get that list started of 'Famous Belgians Who Aren't Fictional So You Can't Include Hercule Poirot'!

Jean Ray was the pseudonym of Belgian French Language writer Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (I'd have stuck with that I must admit). There's not a lot of his stuff that's been translated into English - in fact this might be the only volume available at the moment (and for the princely sum of £45-00 if you want to go to ABE!). I understand the Romanian press Ex Occidente is planning to put out a volume of his stories but until then we'll have to satisfy ourselves with this slim paperback. I also note that there's a tiny thread on Vault Mk 1 devoted to this so if Mr D fancies slotting in a cover scan of this one in all its pulpy glory that would be lovely.

Gold Teeth: Abel Teal earns the necessary crust by breaking into people's coffins and stealing their teeth. No random coffin-robber is our Abel - he keeps tabs with the local dentists and the local hospital so that he knows the minute a prize haul is going into the ground or the local mausoleum. But one day he meets his match...and ends up marrying her.

What a strange little story to start this book off with! Ghoulish and cruel without any supernatural element. The mechanism by which Abel gets into coffins will appeal to the DIY enthusiast in everyone. And the female characters are depicted as grasping cruel and violent, except for the one nice one who dies horribly.

[dem]

*dredged from old thread where it was doing nothing*

Blurb for Berkley Paperback edition, 1965:
THE LIVING DEAD

In GHOULS IN MY GRAVE you enter the dread world of the living dead where madness lurks and terror reigns. A few samples:
In THE GOLD TEETH, Abel, a "mining" man, who excavates gold from the dental ware of the dead, encounters a reluctant corpse one night in Abney Park Cemetery:
". . . The dead man had just closed his mouth and sunk his teeth deep into my fingers through my rubber gloves. . ."
In THE CEMETERY WATCHMAN, a passing stranger, hired to guard the mysterious mausoleum of Dutchess Opolchenska in Saint Guitton Cemetery has an un­expected visitor one night:
" I was crushed by a formidable weight. Sharp teeth bit into my neck, and cold loath­some lips began greedily sucking my blood ..."

Originally credited to Ray's pseudonym John Flanders, Ghouls In My Grave is a neat introduction to the more pulpish works of "the Belgian Poe". Robert Hadji has compared him to both Lovecraft and Seabury Quinn which should certainly prepare the reader for something odd. I wasn't sure where to put him as Ray was Belgiun - really must add a Europe & Rest of the World section - but as four of his stories appeared in Weird Tales under the John Flanders byline in 1934 and '35, here's as good a place as any for the time being.

Includes:

Gold Teeth: England, various cemeteries. The adventures of Abel Teal and Elsa, a husband and wife grave-robbing team whose booty is the golden dental wear of the dead. Non-supernatural, but contains a spookily horrible moment when, during his courtship of Elsa's doomed sister, Abel is at work in Abney Park Cemetery when the teeth of a dead man snap shut on his fingers, cutting through his rubber gloves. His wife-to-be had got there first and placed a trap in the corpses mouth. She just didn't like competition.

The Last Traveler: Mr. Buttercup is stalked by an invisible being - possibly Death personified - who drives him up onto the roof of a snowbound tavern, leaving terrible footprints to mark his passing. Dr. Hellermund later informs Buttercup of his similar experience when he was resident physician in a ward for the terminally ill.

Phil Strong reprints this as The Mystery Of The Last Guest in Other Worlds (Garden City, 1942)

The Cemetery Watchman: "I was crushed by a formidable weight. Sharp teeth bit into my neck, and cold loathsome lips began greedily sucking my blood .... "
Saint Guiton Cemetery, an immense Necropolis bought by the Duchess Opoltcheviska on the understanding that she should be the last person buried there and that three watchmen - her ex-servants and another of their choice - be employed to guard it. A hobo is the eighth man to join the ever-present Ossip and Velitcho who seem obsessed with making sure that he has plenty of food. Curiously, the more they build him up, the weaker he gets. One night he sees a dreadful figure leaving her Mausoleum and understands why the Duchess Opoltcheviska insisted on buying out the grounds.

Peter Haining reproduces this as The Guardian Of The Cemetery in Vampires: Chilling Tales Of The Undead (Target, 1985)

[Johnlprobert]

Many thanks, Mr D!

This is shaping up to be a decent little collection and is well worth seeking out.

The Shadowy Street: A really weird 'two for the price of one' tale in which two seemingly unrelated stories collide with each other due to the appearance of a street from another dimension that causes people to disappear. Very little in the way of explanation and a bizarre coda that just increases the enigmatic feel of this makes it a classic that's well worth discovering.

I Killed Alfred Heavenrock: How is David Heavenrock to obtain the fortune of the beautiful Miss Florence Bee? By creating a made up cousin Alfred and then impersonating him, that's how. But Alfred has other ideas.

The Cemetery Watchman: I wouldn't have thought it possible for me to find an old vampire story scary but this one is. Our hero gets a job with two other men of guarding the local graveyard where there hasn't been a burial since the Duchess Opolchenska who has bought the cemetery and is now feeding off the new hired help. Guess who's next on the menu? A really scary vampire and a gung-ho method of despatch of said nasty makes this lots of fun.

The Mainz Psalter: Hodgson meets Lovecraft in another enigmatic cosmic-horror inspired fable of a life on the ocean weird. Again, like 'The Shadowy Street' there is little in the way of explanation, a genuine feel for the weird and an ending that only adds to the enigma.

[dem]

Re Gold Teeth. I used to knock about in Abney Park cemetery a bit toward the close of the 'nineties and i'll certainly vouch for it as a decent setting for a horror story. As is so often the case with the capital's cems, rumours of a vampire were doing the rounds and the usual selfless, publicity shy 'experts' were tearing out each others' eyes to be interviewed on Sky about it. Something everyone found it convenient to overlook was that, shortly prior to these rumours of a plague of the undead revival, the Mediaeval Babes had given an impromptu performance among the gravestones, and at least a few of these enchantresses wore fangs and dressed very goth. As did the majority of their fans. Putting two and two together ...

It's scandalous and not a little odd that an author as prolific, commercially successful and generally well regarded as Flanders/ Ray/ Kremers has had so little of his work published in English translations, particularly during the 'sixties and 'seventies pocket paperback boom when you'd have expected an imprint like Berkeley not to just leave it on the one slimline collection. Wordsworth?

[marksamuels]

Mais oui, c'est Jean Ray! Tres bien!

I've got a copy of GHOULS IN MY GRAVE too. I've been promised a copy of Ex Occidente's THE HORRIFYING PRESENCE, but it's not shown up at The Samuels Garret yet. Oh well.

Years ago I read MALPERTUIS, which was fun. It's about a bunch of Greek Gods come back to exist in a decayed mansion. A Belgian friend lent me a VHS copy of the film version (with Orson Welles no less), but as it was in Flemish (at least I don't think it was French), I found it hard to catch all the nuances.

Anyway, let's try a couple of You-Tubes.

The first is the MALPERTUIS trailer.



The second is Jean Ray himself on camera.



Apologies for the ads. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of them.

Mark S.

[marksamuels]

Sorry, I meant to say something about Abney Park Cemetery. Not vampires ;D, though I know what events Dem's referring to ( ) Anyway moving on swiftly...

There's a Lovecraft buried there! It's true. One of HPL's English relatives. One John Lovecraft who died 8 Nov 1875. If anyone wants to dig up some "essential saltes" it's Burial 057803 Section E08 Index ZS10 (though it could be 2510--I can't read my own handwriting!). That would make for "Ghouls in my Grave"

But don't blame me for the consequences...especially the baying of some gigantic Hound...

Mark S.

[Johnlprobert]

The Last Traveler: Mr Buttercup, probably one of the more ludicrously named characters in horror fiction, finds himself, at the end of the holiday season, being stalked through the Ocean Queen Hotel by a huge and horrible thing that has presumably stolen the soul of dead Mr Windgery. It leaves some bloody great footprints in the snow on the roof but otherwise that's pretty much it and he survives to tell the tale. For some reason the thing made me think of the monster from the movie 'The Creeping Flesh'.

The Black Mirror: "Edith Bronx would have been very pretty if hyperthyroidism had not given her light blue eyes a rather frightening expression" . Dr Baxter-Brown steals the mirror of Dr John Dee and promptly has his pipe Polly stolen by whatever lives within it. Polly turns up being puffed away at by some invisible fiend, usually during more of Dr B-B's burglary antics. He eventually gets his pipe back, but at a terrible price.

Mr Glass Changes Direction: Another weird one. David Glass decides to do away with anyone who has done him wrong, impersonates a serial killer, kills the serial killer, wins the lottery and ends up strangled. No idea what the point to this one was as it seemed a bit all over the place, and it's certainly a funny one to end the volume on. Maybe it lost something in translation?

I did enjoy this quirky collection of horror stories though. They felt like a cross between 'classic' horror and Robert Bloch quickies, but again that might be due to how they were translated.

[cw67q]

Hello everyone,

There is a new collection of Jean Ray's stories translated into England from Ex Occidente Press "the Horrifying Presence".

I believe this includes new translations of some of the tales from GimG, at least those ones that didn't appear in the Midnight House volume "My Own private Spectres" of a few years back.

I've not seen the new book yet, although I have ordered a copy.

Here is a link to Ex Occidente (based in Romania):

www.exocccidente.com/

cheers - chris