by Matt Cardin
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Ancestral Curse; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan.
Further Reading
Lévy, Maurice. 1988. “The Depths of Horror.” In Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, translated by S. T. Joshi, 63–72. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. 1999. “The Rats in the Walls.” In The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 89–108. Annotations by S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin Books.
Monteleone, Paul. 1995. “‘The Rats in the Walls’: A Study in Pessimism.” Lovecraft Studies 32 (Spring): 18–26.
St. Armand, Barton Levi. 1977. The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press.
RAY, JEAN (1887–1964)
Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym of Belgian writer Raymundus Joannes de Kremer. His fiction combines elements of the Gothic and modernist fiction; his stories involve both sensational and philosophical elements, laid out with a self-awareness in the story itself that bridges the gap between the more straightforward textual qualities of Gothic fiction—the reliance on frame narratives, the use of letters and other documentation alongside or instead of direct narration—and the formal experimentation of surrealist and modernist writers. His stories are characterized by a rapid switching between wonder and horror; they are often whimsical even as they are terrible. Destiny, Faustian bargains, and demonic presences, who are associated with madness as much as they are with malice or temptation, are his preferred themes.
“The Shadowy Street”: A Netherworld of Living Darkness
Also translated as “The Tenebrous Alley” (original title: “La Ruelle Tenebreuse”), Jean Ray’s short story “The Shadowy Street” first appeared in his second collection, Le Croisiere des Ombres (1932), and was first published in English in his 1956 collection Ghouls in My Grave. It is generally regarded as one of Ray’s best stories, and it shows him using the narrative strategy of multiplying accounts. The narrator finds two letters, in two different languages, written by two different persons, both of which independently describe certain related curious events in Hamburg. The first letter, written in German by a woman named Frida, relates how the city seems to have become haunted by a terrifying darkness, deeper than night. Dozens of people vanish without a trace, even from within the supposed safety of their homes. On one occasion, she describes how her sister fought off an invisible assailant, not unlike Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla,” wounding it with a sword. Her story breaks off abruptly. The second letter, in French, was penned by a schoolteacher living in Hamburg. He has found a street that no one else can see, Saint Beregonne’s Lane, which seems to lead out of this world. Like certain localities in the stories of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, the lane seems to select who will be able to find it. The far end of the lane is a netherworld of malevolent, living darkness, shadowing the city, occupied by shades who venture forth into the real Hamburg by night to wreak havoc. The schoolteacher finally burns down that part of the city, trying to close off the aperture. The narrator investigates further, but succeeds, as is not unusual in Ray’s stories, only in deepening the mystery.
Michael Cisco
Ray was born in the Belgian town of Ghent, also known as Gand; his father was an official in maritime affairs and his mother ran a girls’ school. Ray did not complete college, worked in low-level city clerical jobs, got involved in writing, and worked for a time as an editor on local periodicals. He married in 1912.
Ray’s first book was a collection of grotesque and fantastic short stories called Les Contes du Whisky, or “Whisky Stories,” published in 1925. These tales reflected Ray’s lasting interest in England and America, his penchant for wildly unusual ideas, and his love of Hoffmann-esque experts, mad scientists, and other ominous officials.
Charged with participation in a scheme of embezzlement in 1926, Ray was found guilty, and in 1927 he was sent to prison. It was as a prisoner that he wrote two of his best known works, “The Shadowy Street” and “The Mainz Psalter.” Although he had been sentenced to a six-year term, Ray was released in 1929. From this point forward, the exact details of his life are hard to pin down. Since Ray deliberately obscured or even falsified many of the facts of his life, it is not certain whether he really did engage in smuggling, rum running, or piracy, as he sometimes claimed. It is clear that he earned his living as a sailor for a time.
Financial troubles and a lack of opportunities made him a very prolific writer. Jean Ray was only one of many pen names, John Flanders being the one he preferred when writing in Flemish, which is one of the two languages commonly spoken in Belgium. Ray had been asked to translate a series of German-language stories about a fictional detective named Harry Dickson, the “American Sherlock Holmes.” Ray didn’t think the stories were that good, and he began writing his own, expanding the adventures of Harry Dickson by hundreds of new tales.
It is not clear what Ray did during World War II, but after the war’s end he published six books in rapid succession: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l’Inidicible Peur (1943), Malpertuis (1943), Les Cercles de l’Epouvante (1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944), and Le Livre des Fantomes (1947). The first English edition of his work was Ghouls in My Grave, published in 1965.
In 1955, French author Raymond Queneau helped to bring Malpertuis back into print in France; this helped Ray avoid disappearing from public view. In 1959, he met with Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker known for Hiroshima Mon Amour and L’Année Derniere á Marienbad. Resnais was interested in building a film around Harry Dickson. While the film never happened, it is likely that this encounter was responsible for the involvement of Resnais’s screenwriter, Jean Ferry, in creating the screenplay for Harry Kuemel’s 1971 film adaptation of Malpertuis. There was also a film adaptation of La Cité de l’Inidicible Peur by Jean-Pierre Mocky in 1964.
Michael Cisco
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Malpertuis; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Monteiro, António. 2011. “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray.” Weird Fiction Review, November 21. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/ghosts-fear-and-parallel-worlds-the-supernatural-fiction-of-jean-ray.
Van Calenbergh, Hubert. 1999. “Jean Ray and the Belgian School of the Weird.” Studies in Weird Fiction 24 (Winter): 14–17.
“THE REACH”
“The Reach” is a story by Stephen King that was published under the title “Do the Dead Sing?” in the November 1981 issue of Yankee magazine and later collected in Skeleton Crew (1985). It is one of King’s most evocative depictions of life in small-town Maine, and thus can be considered a sidebar to his tales of horror set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock.
Although its narrative point of view is omniscient, the story is essentially a glimpse into the mind of Stella Flanders, a woman who lives on Goat Island off the coast of Maine. In her ninety-five years, Stella has never once crossed the reach, the name given to the stretch of water that separates the island from the mainland. Suffering from cancer, Stella has begun to see ghosts, notably that of her dead husband Bill, who invites her to cross the reach to join him. Stella’s thoughts about Bill and the life and family she had with him leads her to reflect on her many years on the island and the people she has known. Her random memories conjure the image of a self-sufficient, close-knit community who have looked out for one another and lived their lives largely independent of the world beyond their island. At the height of a severe snowstorm, Stella bundles up and sets out to cross the frozen-over reach to the mainland. En route, she finds herself helped out by Bill and friends who passed away over the years. The next day she is found frozen to death on the mainland—and the discovery that she’s wearing a hat that Bill handed to her during her crossing dispels any doubt that the friends who accompanied her were only in her imagination. Her fate also confirms that crossing the reach was not just a physical journey, it was metaphori
c for passing from life into the afterlife.
Auspiciously, “The Reach” was published one year before Different Season, a collection of four short novels in which King applied the techniques and approaches he had honed in his macabre fiction to stories with mainstream literary appeal. The tale is one of his most successful demonstrations of the potential for fantastic and supernatural fiction to address concerns universal to fiction irrespective of genre pigeonholing—an appraisal that has gained considerable traction in the twenty-first century with King’s embrace by the literary mainstream. The title “Do the Dead Sing?” alludes to a passage in the story—“Do the dead sing? Do they love?” (King 1986, 566)—made in reference to the souls of the dead singing over the dying into the warm embrace of their community in the afterlife. It casts in a reassuring light the proximity of the dead to the living that is more often depicted as menacing in tales of the supernatural.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Collings, Michael, and Engbretson, David. 1985. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
King, Stephen. 1986. Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet.
Reino, Joseph. 1988. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Boston: Twayne.
Winter, Douglas. 1986. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: Signet.
“THE RECRUDESCENE OF IMRAY”/
“THE RETURN OF IMRAY”
“The Recrudescence of Imray” by Rudyard Kipling was published in America, in 1891, in Kipling’s fiction collection Mine Own People, the same year that it was published in England in Life’s Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People under the title “The Return of Imray.” The story is a loose sequel to Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast,” and like that story it features the character of Strickland, a British police investigator living in India who has a deep knowledge of the Indian people and their ways. Also like “The Mark of the Beast,” “The Recrudescence of Imray” touches on the “imperial Gothic,” the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary subgenre in which traditional Gothic motifs were drawn upon and transformed to show the dominant Western values of the British Empire being threatened by contamination from the “other” represented by colonial subjects, particularly in India and other Eastern locales.
“The Recrudescence of Imray” is in fact set in India, and it begins with the disappearance of Imray, apparently a very genial man-about-town. After Imray has been missing some months, Strickland of the police and his dog Tietjens move into Imray’s bungalow, though Tietjens refuses to enter and sleeps on the veranda. When the narrator visits, he feels and shares Tietjens’s unease, and when he and Strickland investigate some snakes that are living between the ceiling cloth and the bungalow roof, they discover the corpse of Imray. Strickland realizes the murderer could only be Imray’s servant, Bahadur Khan, and he confronts Khan, who confesses: he believed that Imray’s patting the head of his child was the casting of an evil eye, for the child died soon thereafter. But though Strickland wants to hang Bahadur Khan, the man escapes European justice.
Although the two titles of the story hint at humor, “The Recrudescence of Imray” is grim. A benevolent gesture is misinterpreted, for the different cultures have failed to communicate, and the conclusion offers no real hope for better relations: the narrator realizes only that his servant has been with him just as long as Bahadur Khan was with Imray. It can be debated whether the story is a primitive detective story, for Strickland does very little detecting, but in its borderline supernaturalism and in its denouement—the revelation of the rotting corpse of a murdered man hidden in the ceiling of his bungalow—it is remarkably horrific. The only one to escape unscathed is Tietjens, whose entrance into the bungalow at the conclusion reveals that everything has been satisfactorily resolved.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “They.”
Further Reading
Morey, Peter. 2000. “Gothic and Supernatural: Allegories at Work and Play in Kipling’s Indian Fiction.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 201–217. New York: Palgrave.
Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. “Imperial Gothic.” In The Gothic, 44–49. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
THE RETURN
The Return is the second of three novels written by prolific British writer Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and the second of his two longer works (the first being Henry Brocken, 1904) to deal with themes of supernaturalism, for which his short stories and poems such as “The Listeners” are more famous.
Published in 1910 and revised in both 1922 and 1945, The Return tells the story of Arthur Lawford, who, having fallen asleep on a grave on unconsecrated ground, is possessed by the spirit of the grave’s occupant, and who begins to take on the physical (though not entirely the psychological) characteristics of the dead man. Unrecognized by his family and loved ones, Lawford’s condition is the premise for de la Mare’s mournful meditation on death, self-enforced isolation, and the fragility of personal identity and social bonds.
With echoes of Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), de la Mare’s story engages early modernist, twentieth-century anxieties concerning Freudian psychology and the (at the time) growing awareness of the tenuous nature of individual personality.
Lawford’s physical transmogrification is really a foil for de la Mare’s subtler psychological probing into the fundamentals of self and the spiritual and emotional horrors that people would experience were family and loved ones suddenly unable to recognize them. In this way, Lawford’s experience is very much an inversion of the traditional Capgras syndrome frequently found in alien invasion narratives (such as Jack Finney’s 1955 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers), in which the protagonist’s loved ones physically resemble themselves but have otherwise been psychologically taken over by invaders. In this particular instance, it is Lawford’s wife, Sheila, who struggles with the belief that he is, in fact, still her husband.
De la Mare raises questions as to the validity of personal (and religious) faith in the face of logic and reason, and part of the narrative’s horror for the reader derives from the supernatural impossibilities of Lawford’s metamorphosis, as something very much against nature. Moreover, The Return illustrates the notion that body and mind are nondualistic, that they are in fact separate, and that the individual is at all times inherently a stranger to him/herself.
Beyond supernatural horror, The Return is also a painfully human tale about the disintegration of love between a husband and wife, and the psychologically destructive effects of domestic trauma. While Lawford, at first, fears the loss of his family’s love due to his physical change (his wife believes that he is an impostor), his self-imposed retreat from her, and the acceptance he finds from another woman, makes it clear that the emotional horror underpinning this story is the unfathomable power of love and the tragedy that ensues when love between two people fades. Indeed, Lawford’s internalized self-loathing, manifested in the story as a literal transformation into another person, is echoed somewhat in de la Mare’s own personal history; for after his wife became an invalid from Parkinson’s disease, de la Mare himself was cared for by a sick-nurse, whom he in turn loved deeply.
Ian Kinane
See also: de la Mare, Walter; Irving, Washington; “The Listeners”; “Out of the Deep”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Further Reading
Clute, John. 1985. “Walter de la Mare.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 497–504. New York: Scribner Sons.
de la Mare, Walter. [1910] 2012. The Return. London: John Murray.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012.
The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
McCrosson, Doris Ross. 1966. Walter de la Mare. New York: Twayne.
RICE, ANNE (1941–)
Anne Rice is a leading American horror and Gothic writer who made her mark with her debut novel Interview with the Vampire (1976). She was born to a New Orleans Catholic family, and her work as a writer has been indelibly influenced by these surroundings and religious upbringing, as well as her years living with her poet-husband Stan Rice in Haight-Ashbury and the Castro district in San Francisco, before settling once again in New Orleans. San Francisco and New Orleans are the home of many of her most iconic characters, offering an ideal backdrop for many of her literary explorations of religious belief, Catholic doctrine, sensuality, sexuality, morality, mortality, and the nature of good and evil. These themes and atmospheres underpin her writing. Since the success of her first novel, her writing career has been diverse, following Interview with the Vampire with historical period dramas such as Feast of All Saints (1978) and Cry to Heaven (1982), alongside two series of erotic novels written under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling (Exit to Eden, 1985; Belinda, 1986) and A. N. Roquelaure (The Sleeping Beauty Series, 1983–1985/2015). In the 2000s, in a period in which she reembraced her religious upbringing, she turned to Christian fiction, telling stories about Jesus Christ (The Life of Christ series, 2005/2008) and angels (Songs of the Seraphim series, 2009/2010). While these genres of literature appear on the surface to be contrasting, they share a preoccupation with negotiating identity—of the author as well as her characters.
