| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
This guy's stuff sounds tasty; anyone heard of him/read him? Just seen his books on that site I posted a link to on the 'old time horror author' thread; http://www.facesoffantastic.com/lit_jeanray.html | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.33.84 |
I've been recommending Jean Ray to people (on this board and others) for years. He wrote some brilliant stories - 'The Mainz Psalter' and 'The Tenebrous Alley' are two of his best - but remains little known even among afficionados of weird fiction. Our own Hubert was responsible for translating the tales collected in the Midnight House volume My Own Private Spectres, which came out a few years ago and now seems almost impossible to find. His earlier English-language collection Ghouls in My Grave is equally good. His novel Malpertuis is easier to get a hold of, and was the basis for the film by Harry Kumel (featuring Orson Welles). | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.147.51.96 |
Just ordered Malpertius. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.33.84 |
Do try to read 'The Mainz Psalter' and 'The Shadowy Street' (aka 'The Tenebrous Alley'), Tony - they are classics of 'otherworldly' horror. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.237.98 |
I still have six copies of MY OWN PRIVATE SPECTRES floating around somewhere, but assuredly won't be selling them. I never expected the book to become a collector's item so quickly! Even John Pelan wanted to buy them back at one point. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
I wish someone would release stuff like this in affordable trade paperback...blah-blah-blah. Right, now I'm off to piss in the wind. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.237.98 |
We actually tried to get it reprinted as a trade paperback and did approach several publishers. Although it was nominated for a Bram Stoker award at the time, no-one was interested. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
Probably because there are no zombies in it. :-/ | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.33.84 |
There are all manner of weird things in Ray's fiction. He wasn't nicknamed 'the Belgian Poe' for nothing! Ghouls in my Grave turns up occasionally on the secondhand market. Some of his stories (including the two I mentioned above) can be found in anthologies edited by Marvin Kaye. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
>>Ghouls in My Grave This sounds like an anthology that might turn up in a Campbell story. Sort of over the top. Are you guys making him up?  | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.23.233.246 |
Damn... | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
Seems you've gone so far as to film one of his so called stories.... http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/malpertuis.htm I didn't quickly realise what was on that man's bed... | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.21.234.188 |
The film has its moments, but next to the novel it's rubbish. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Harlan Ellison somewhere tells the story of working with a TV director who told him "You don't understand Jean Ray." He initially struggled to see what a science fiction script had to do with a French Gothic writer... then the director explained: "You don't understand that a Jean Ray has its own rules that need to be followed." | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.21.234.188 |
He had some good ideas, but he wrote FAST and seldom revised. There's an anecdote about him rushing a Harry Dickson yarn off to the printer: apparently upon arrival the ink was still wet. Literally. MALPERTUIS is almost too good to have been written by him. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.180.226 |
Joel, you've plumbed new depths of painful pundom with that above post. ;-) | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.23.233.246 |
Hubert; apparently it was the one book he did labor over. He sounds fascinating. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Huw, it's a real Ellison anecdote – I didn't make it up, and I suspect he didn't either. In other words it happened. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.21.234.188 |
I wonder what film they were working on. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.180.226 |
Really, Joel? I thought you were up to your usual punnery, and had slyly used 'Jean Ray' for 'genre'. p/s 'Cosmic ore', indeed! Where do you come up with these? Is there a special pun shop you go to?  | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.78.35.170 |
I read a lot of Jean Ray stories as a kid - he wrote truly great scare children books under the name "John Flanders" - a classic is "spoken op de ruwe heide" or "ghosts on the wild moors". Later on I read Malpertuis which was special enough, but many of his short weird stories are not that good - he simply wrote too much. I now realise that I haven't read his supposedly masterful first collection, and so I ordered a nice thick french paperback containing this and many others. I am interested in his last, unfinished book: Saint-Judas (or somthing like that). Did anyone here read it? Hubert maybe? | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.230.9 |
Still, for those of you who understand French there's plenty to be discovered: LES CONTES DU WHISKY LE CARROUSEL DES MALÉFICES LA CITÉ DE L'INDICIBLE PEUR LES CONTES NOIRS DU GOLF BESTIAIRE FANTASTIQUE LES 25 MEILLEURES HISTOIRES NOIRES ET FANTASTIQUES LES DERNIERS CONTES DE CANTERBURY LE LIVRE DES FANTOMES HARRY DICKSON 1-16 (very uneven quality!) The above are all o.p. Marabouts (Série Fantastique); on the other hand Les Amis de Jean Ray (a club of afficionados loosely created around Ray collector André Verbrugghen and French academic Arnaud Huftier) are systematically re-editing the very extensive Ray corpus. Not all of it is weird, however. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.230.9 |
As for "Saint Judas de la Nuit", a translation of this is included in MY OWN PRIVATE SPECTRES. I added a few scraps which we found in magazines and notebooks - they were very obviously meant to be inserted at some later point and have a subtly strengthening effect. The tale remains obscure and somewhat skeletal, but markedly less so than the original, which can be found in LE LIVRE DES FANTOMES. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Huw, I think Ellison's point was that the director couldn't pronounce 'genre'... Anyway, that joke has outstayed its welcome. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.34.214 |
Okay, I get it now. Sorry - I've been very slow on the uptake these last few days. Anyone seen the new documentary on Ellison? | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.230.9 |
"Although it was nominated for a Bram Stoker award at the time, . . . " I stand corrected: apparently, it wasn't  | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.190.61 |
New documentary, Huw? Please tell me more. I'm a massive enthusiast of Ellison's work, particularly from the 1980s. He's had a quiet couple of decades since then, but he was writing great fiction for a long time. All of his work feels like horror to me, whether it's notionally supernatural, SF, crime, mainstream or whatever. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.182.42 |
Joel, there's not much about it on here, but this is the IMDB page for it:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018887/ Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008) I'm looking forward to it, though I'll probably have to wait until it's out on DVD. It's being shown in 'selected theatres' right now, apparently. There was an article about it in Deathray magazine (issue 7, I think) along with a long feature/interview of HE. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.182.42 |
And here's the trailer on youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dmfzKKM49uY YouTube - Harlan Ellison-DREAMS WITH SHARP TEETH | ||
| Barbara Roden (Nebuly) Username: Nebuly Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 216.232.189.45 |
A friend in Germany sent me this link in an e-mail message; it's to a video on YouTube of Jean Ray. My French is shaky at best, but in the first part he appears to be reminiscing; in the second and third parts he appears to be reading, probably from Malpertuis. He looks and sounds wonderful, a bit like a French (or Belgian) Algernon Blackwood. If anyone can offer a translation, it would be appreciated. Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/6ztde4 | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.227.122 |
I'll see what I can do, Barbara. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.149.134.59 |
Thanks Huw. HE wearing a baseball cap! Scary. |