Cruise of Shadows: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea

A pretty awesome and singular weird fiction collection. Jean Ray reminds me almost of Robert Aickman in the degree to which his stories accrue strange details until reality itself falls away, but always in an allusive and strange way. He's quite a bit more pulpy though, so all hell tends to break loose in a way it doesn't for Aickman, and yet things remain unsolved... Credit also to all Wakefield's editions of Ray, which are exemplary even by their standards. Scott Nicolay's love and deep engagement with these books is delightful and he provides a huge number of explanatory annotations and an excellent afterword doing a little literary archaeology to situation Jean Ray in the tradition of weird fiction. Malpertuis may be Ray's best but, show more as Nicolay says, this book is a great pitch for Jean Ray deserving to be in the pantheon of weird fiction writers.

- The Horrifying Presence: More of a tone-setter than a full story, but the final nature of the beast and the way it kills is pretty neat. 3/5

- The End of the Street: A wonderful story, fragmentary, befuddling, and beautifully mournful. Nicolay points out that one of Jean Ray's signatures is that he tends to take a ghost story to where it would normally end and then take it into a further direction that both elaborates on and confuses the previous bit and this is one of the most fluid examples of that style. 5/5

- The Last Guest: A kind of stock ghost story structure for Ray, but not a bad one, and he is really a master at evoking the feeling of being utterly alone in the world. Isn't it interesting, by the way, that invisible monsters figure in every one of these stories? 4/5

- Duhrer, The Idiot: Now this is a Robert Aickman-type story. This thing is utterly enigmatic and deeply unsettling in a way that's difficult to explain. 5+/5

- Mondschein-Dampfer: A very fun twist on Faust with a really interesting ending that takes the story into a much more ambiguous and strange direction than you'd expect. 4/5

- The Gloomy Alley: ABSOLUTE FUCKING BANGER. I think this is absolutely one of the best weird fiction stories of all time and should be essential for anyone interested in the genre. Two perspectives on the same phenomenon turn out to be deeply connected but with a huge outside logic that we never have access to. 5+/5

- The Mainz Psalter: Not quite as good as the previous novella, but still a great time. This one plays with a really fun genre shift, where it starts off as an adventurous pulpy sailing tale and progressively falls apart into chaos and confusion. "We bowed our heads before the Holy Word, and we gave up trying to understand" could be the tagline for this whole collection. 4/5 show less

The excellent translator of Jean Ray's work, Scott Nicolay, provided me this copy as a gift.
Unfortunately, I wasn't as big a fan as I was of City of Unspeakable Fear. Maybe City set up some unfair expectations, but I was anticipating in addition to the weird and disturbing the Dickensian sense of comedy I found in City, and it was lacking here. In terms of individual stories, the opener is easily the most disturbing and strange.

If you love the stories of Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce, you'll love Jean Ray. Being of Franco extraction, he of course adds a dash of poetry and ambiguity to his stories that was missing from other pulp writers of the era.