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Friday, August 9, 2024

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.


6 comments:

  1. Great review, Will. Funny how you mention $40 being your upper limit when it comes to buying vintage paperbacks. Not too long ago I would have put mine at $10 or so, and I’m placing the blame on your and Grady’s (excellent) Paperbacks From Hell for why it’s gone up substantially! To be fair, this one’s been pricy for ages.

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  2. A lot of Ray's stuff has been republished, but so far, not this one. That's a bummer, because more people should be able to get a copy, it's definitely worth reading.

    This is going to drive you nuts after paying $40 (which is still totally worth it), but I got my copy of this at a library sale (along with all the "Frankenstein Horror Series" books, most of the Robert Lory Dracula series, the Barton Werper Tarzan novels and a whole bunch of other really rare holy grail stuff) at the price of $3-a-WalMart-bag-full. One of the luckiest days of my life. Later they sold off a couple of crates of old Weird Tales issues and I got those, too, for a couple bucks (and I tried to explain to them what they were doing, just to molify any guilt about taking advantage of 'em, but, nope, they didn't want to deal with 'em). It's lucky to run across a library that doesn't know what they have... the short-sighted trend-hopping fools were focusing on "ebooks."

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  3. Nice find, Will, and you too, Zwolf. My own best find was at a hole-in-the-wall comic and paperback shop in Chicago back in the late 70s. All the old Ace Doubles in the place were in plastic bags with fairly high prices. On his regular shelves, what did I find but a copy of the Regency Books first printing of Harlan Ellison's GENTLEMAN JUNKIE. 60 cents. Guy at the counter was a bit unpleasant; I didn't bother to tell him what he'd just done.

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  4. Ray has been called "The Belgian Poe" and the equal of Lovecraft. His best is as good as their best. He was however uneven. (So actually were Poe and Lovecraft.)

    Wakefield Press has been reprinting his work. They are worth reading despite his uneveness, though you may want to skip the first Whiskey Tales. It's his weakest, is not pure horror, and has a fair bit of antisemitism. Ray got better both in his writing and his views of Jewish people.

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  5. Damn! Never heard of the book or movie! Found the film on YT. Will watch it.

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