Ghouls in My Grave by Jean Ray (1965): Dig Up Her Bones

This past spring I was visiting San Diego to meet up with family and on the drive down that way lucked into finding a delightful little bookstore, Artifact Books (not to be confused with Artifacts bookstore in Hood River, OR). I poked around a bit, found a small horror section, and then found the long boxes of bagged vintage paperbacks, various genres, but mostly fantasy and horror. Unfortunately for me, I already owned most of what I was looking through, but the titles were definitely highly collectible.

But a surprise was in store, for suddenly I was face to face with the gaping grinning skull adorning the purple cover of Ghouls in My Grave, a thin 1965 paperback from Berkley Medallion, by Belgian author Jean Ray. Huzzah! I'd only been looking for this guy for decades! Sure, I'd seen it online, at pretty high prices, and who knows in what condition it was actually in, but now I had it in my hands. It was priced at $40, which is about the very highest I will go on vintage paperbacks, but I felt fate and good luck were at work here, and who am I to blow against the wind?

Then I saw the owner at the checkout desk, tattooed fella in a metal shirt who seemed just about my age, and figured I was safe asking if he'd ever heard of Paperbacks from Hell... "Oh, yeah, I love it, love Grady Hendrix!" So I let him in on who I was, and we chatted for quite a little while. Can't recommend this spot highly enough; if you're ever in the area, stop in, browse awhile. Be sure to check out the glass case filled with Arkham House hardcovers too!

On to the book of tales at hand: two of the stories collected here are surefire weird fiction classics, longer works that whisper of cosmic madness and the unknowable, almost malevolent universe. One is a gloomy sea adventure, "The Mainz Psalter," while the other is a kind of proto metafiction tale entitled "The Shadowy Street." Both were originally written in French in the early Thirties, published in the 1932 collection La croisière des ombres ("the cruise of shadows," a reference to "Mainz Psalter"), and would've been a perfect in an issue of "Weird Tales" along Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, and the like.

Both stories see Ray utilizing the tale-within-a-tale (and even another layer after that) technique to heighten the horror. In "The Mainz Psalter", a mortally wounded sailor regales the crew of the ship that rescued him with a story that evokes William Hope Hodgson, Lovecraft, and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Aboard the titular craft, a series of bizarre occurrences hint of the otherworldly. "The Shadowy Street" is in part about a man who discovers a street seemingly hidden in another dimension, but that is only part of the ambitious narrative...

Jean Ray, pseudonym of Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (1887-1964)

The other stories here lack the formal sophistication of the aforementioned; fine enough tales, yes, but more reminiscent of general horror pulp of the Thirties and Forties. There's an interesting vampire story I had not read before; strange goings-on in a hotel closed for the season; a man invents a dastardly cousin in order to get close to a woman; a graverobber who meets his unexpected match; a cursed artifact that once belong to famed British occultist John Dee... You get the idea. Translated from French by Lowell Bair, Ray's style is erudite, dry, and precise, with an elevated, cosmopolitan tone that tinges the macabre with a sense of irony.

I first became aware of Ghouls in My Grave after reading Danse Macabre, Stephen King's essential 1981 tome of boomer memoir and horror criticism, where he includes it in an appendix of important 20th century horror fiction. For many years I searched for the book, to no avail, and virtually never heard anyone discuss it or author. Closer to 20 years ago I watched the movie adaptation of his 1943 Gothic novel Malpertuis, I think solely because it was by the same director as 1971's Daughters of Darkness, one of my personal genre lodestars. Malpertuis wasn't even translated into English, as far as I could determine, until 1998.

For a writer considered "forgotten" or "obscure," I found plenty of online articles and reviews on him and his output; I feel caught a little flat-footed in this post, as I was expecting to have to do a deep dive and come back with some uncut gems but turns out plenty of folks have been there first. Oh well. At least the online prices for this paperback have gone down to around $20-$25, which I'd say is pretty fair for you collectors. So if mysterious, ambiguous, pulpy tales of gloom, doom, and hapless Europeans receiving supernatural comeuppance are your thing, digging up a copy of Ghouls in My Grave could be quite a reward.