“Then the law of the night gave birth to crevices through which ghosts could slip.”
I think I was first introduced to the works of prolific Belgian writer Jean Ray (in fact only one of the many pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer) in Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s doorstop survey of classic weird tales simply titled The Weird.
The two stories of Ray’s collected in that volume (“The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter“) are probably his best-known among Anglophone readers, and represent two of his best works of weird fiction. Certainly, they were enough to make me track down everything that I could get my hands on in translation – and I have not regretted a single thing that I have read.
Since 2019, Wakefield Press has been putting out a series of new translations of Jean Ray’s short stories and some of his many novels, including his undisputed classic Malpertuis. With the exception of that title, which maintains the extant (and quite good) translation by Iain White, with an extensive afteword by Nicolay, these have all been newly-translated by Scott Nicolay who, as I have said many times before, is doing the proverbial lord’s work in bringing these out in a way that allows me to read them.
As Nicolay himself puts it in his introduction, The City of Unspeakable Fear, first published in French in 1943, sometimes suffers for being the “other novel” from a writer whose debut (the aforementioned Malpertuis) is an acknowledged masterpiece. And certainly, City of Unspeakable Fear is no Malpertuis, and shows no interest in being any such thing.
It is, instead, an admixture of detective novel and ghost story that is, perhaps more than either of those things, a love letter to an England that may only ever have existed in books and in our imaginations.
As I said on social media immediately after finishing the novel, Ray describes his fictional English town of Ingersham with the kind of overly British exoticism that Anglophone writers usually use when writing about pretty much anyplace else – an accurate enough sentiment given that Ray read a lot of English literature, but may never have visited the British Isles.
In proper Ray fashion, however, The City of Unspeakable Fear is nothing so simple as either a detective story or a ghost story – or even some cross-pollination of the two. It is a many-layered thing filled with digressions, narrative cul-de-sacs, false identities, personal obsessions, literary references, and so on. As in just about any Ray story, you could (maybe) summarize the plot of The City of Unspeakable Fear, and still only describe a small fraction of what is actually going on in the book.
Which is not to say that there aren’t moments of genuine horror and compelling mystery in City of Unspeakable Fear. Ray is, after all, the author of the long-running Harry Dickson detective series, so it’s not as if he didn’t know how to spin a mystery yarn.
Indeed, some of the most powerful scenes in City of Unspeakable Fear could have been borrowed from one of Ray’s other ghostly tales, and, because of the nature of the book, with its many stories-within-stories, there are whole miniature ghost stories contained within, including a particularly good one involving a powerful rainstorm and Epinal prints.
There are moments in The City of Unspeakable Fear that would have felt right at home in a Richard Sala comic – the death of Cobwell, for instance, and the explanation of how it came about – while other elements could have come from an Italian giallo film of later decades, such as the truth about Lady Honnybingle. And though it may ultimately engage in more of a “Scooby-Doo ending” than Ray fans might desire, there is something incredibly potent in the way that the novel’s ratiocination often leads to fictions, while the ghosts are presented as decidedly real, if inexplicable.
On Facebook, Nicolay expressed concern that some people might not like this book as much as many of Ray’s others. And perhaps some won’t. But for anyone who is willing to reliniquish the idea of narrative and genre conventions and embrace a book that moves fluidly between them, or defies them altogether, The City of Unspeakable Fear is a gem and an absolute delight.
