Malpertuis, by Jean Ray

 

9781939063702

Wakefield Press, 2021

originally published 1943

translated by Iain White

246 pp

paperback

Sometimes you just find that book that you know is not only unlike anything you've ever read but also makes you wonder just how in the hell you're going to find aything that ever tops it.   This past summer I had the great fortune to have read all four volumes of Belgian author Jean Ray's short-story collections published by Wakefield:  Whisky Tales, Cruise of Shadows: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea, Circles of Dread and The Great Nocturnal, and fell in love almost immediately into the first of these, but it is Malpertuis that's really won my soul as far as Ray's work goes.  

This post will not be a long one since the secret of what lies at the very core of the mystery of the house named Malpertuis should remain exactly that until discovered by the reader.    Divided into two main parts, the story begins with a short introduction written by a thief who had discovered pages of "yellowing, scribbled papers" in a pewter tube while pilfering a monastery.  As he sets out to "sift, to classify, to eliminate" the "work of colossal size,"  he also happened upon a "little notebook, in a neat scholarly hand,  bringing "the number of collaborators to four"  people responsible for the account as a whole. In putting it all together,  now, as he says, this thief-slash editor is "obliged" to add his name 

 "to the role of those Scribes who, without their knowledge (or almost without it),  have given Malpertuis a place in the history of human terror." 

After a brief introductory chapter detailing a shipwreck, the story begins in earnest with the narrative that "constitutes the kernel of the story, around which "the appalling destiny of Jean-Jacques Grandsire that the whole horror of Malpertuis revolves."   And now we're off and into Malpertuis itself, where Jean-Jacques' Uncle Cassave is quite literally on his deathbed with his family all around.  He is obviously a man of great wealth, but his family will not inherit any of it unless they all come to live in the house until their own deaths, and to sweeten the deal they will receive annual allowances.  They may not make any changes to Malpertuis, and there are a few other conditions as well, including that the last surviving inhabitant in the house will acquire Cassave's entire fortune.  

Notably, while this is Jean-Jacques' account, when the name of that house first arises, he becomes anxious:

"Malpertuis! For the first time the name has flowed in a turbid ink from my terrified pen! That house, placed by the most terrible of wills like a full stop at the end of so many human destinies -- I still thrust aside its image! I recoil, I procrastinate rather than bring it to the forefront of my memory!"

He continues:

"What is more, pressed no doubt by the brevity of their earthly term, human beings are less patient than the house; things remain after them, things -- like the stones of which accursed dwellings are made. Human beings are animated by the feverish haste of sleep tumbling through abbatoir gates -- they will not rest until they have taken their place under the great candlesnuffer that is Malpertuis."

There is obviously something terribly wrong about this house, but I had absolutely no clue as to just how wrong things were going to become.  After being plagued by bizarre visions, strange sounds and other occurrences, Jean-Jacques at one point comes to believe he's caught up in a "dream, a nightmare," begging "For the love of God, let me wake up!"  But this is no dream.    While it may sound as if this is prime haunted-house story material, perfect for relaxing curled up in your easy chair while reading,  for me that was definitely not the case -- it is so much more, well beyond your standard fare, with one character describing Malpertuis  as a "kind of 'fold in space...' " and an "abominable point of contact."  

As is the case with his short stories, Jean Ray writes here constructing layers upon interconnecting  layers as he gets closer to the heart of the tale of Malpertuis.   The result is an atmosphere of lingering dread, bleakness and full-on uncanny created by a blending of elements of the mystical, the mythical and the Gothic, leaving the reader with the feeling that perhaps you ought to mentally hold on to a ball of string or lay breadcrumbs as you navigate the labyrinth that is both this house and this story.   I realize that it may not be for everyone -- it does take a lot of patience and time spent thinking through this puzzle of a book and although I thought I'd sussed it a couple of times, what happens here went well beyond anything I could have possibly imagined.  The Wakefield edition has an excellent editor's afterword by Scott Nicolay that by all means should be left until after completing the novel unless, of course, you want to wreck things.  Malpertuis is a wild ride of a novel that I can most heartily recommend to readers of the strange.   I was completely entranced, off in another world altogether as I read it.   

Intimations of Death, by Felix Timmermans

9781948405409
Valancourt Books, 2019
originally published as Schemerigen van den Dood, 1910
translated by Paul Vincent
150 pp

paperback

"Are you frightened of Death and the dead?" 

I don't think I've ever read a book of stories that was so completely morbid as this one.  Not that I didn't have a clue from the title that death was going to be on the agenda here, but jeez Louise.  Normally I think of the word "intimation" in terms of a hint or an indication, but that's definitely not the case here.

The blurb on the back cover of this book reveals that Felix Timmermans (1886-1947) wrote the stories in this collection "after a near-death experience with a serious illness."   It also notes that he

" reveals a more morbid side and delivers a collection of psychological horror tales worthy of Edgar Allan Poe."  

  The comparison to Poe is beyond apt, not just because of the macabre themes and episodes depicted throughout these stories, but also due to Timmermans'  use of landscape and various settings designed to echo the characters' inner torments and mental states.  And tormented these people are, from the first story to the last, with no exceptions.

 "The Mourner" makes for the perfect opener to this collection, beginning in an isolated house with barred windows on a "dark beech avenue" where it seems that death is no stranger.  Not only had the narrator "helped carry three dead souls -- a brother and two sisters" out of  the house to the cemetery, but the house, described as being  "the color of congealed blood," is enclosed by a "deep black moat, covered in green scum" into which a tramp had once fallen and drowned.  The narrator (who is telling this story at a much later time), reveals that the house had been in the family for generations, at least back to the time of his great-grandfather; as he puts it, "it was in our blood to live there."

"But those who had lived there had never been aware of the mysterious air weighing on the soul, which had pressed down in the house and across the plain; but my heart was like a gate open to the unknown, and I always had the clear consciousness of another life around me."

He had felt "the soul of things" and although he lived in solitude with his family there, he had a sense of "not being alone," which made him afraid and made "life sad;" he describes it as the "face of the unknown that was watching our hands."   He also sees signs in everything around him, which makes what happens as he waits with his mother and father, nearly unbearable.  Every noise is detailed, silence is weighed,  his senses are on ultra-high alert as he takes in every sound, every flash of lightning.  And then, when someone rings the bell in the midst of it all ...

reproduction of one the illustrations used in the original

In the final story, "The Unknown," a couple whose families are against their marriage decide to end it all together so that they might at least be happy and together forever in death.  Things go awry when she dies and he is rescued; at first he is happy to be alive, but he feels himself invaded by an "unknown thing" that takes over his life in more ways than one.

In between these two stories, as the back-cover blurb reveals,

"A scholar of the occult finds his marriage threatened by horrifying and otherworldly noises emanating from the cellar -- During a plague outbreak a gravedigger accidentally prepares one too many graves and becomes obsessed with the thought that the final grave will be his own.  -- A haunted man, seeking refuge in a monastery, is convinced that Death itself stalks him in the building's lonely halls..." 

 With the exception of "The White Vase,"  these strange, gothic tales are related via a certain distance; as John Howard puts it in his excellent introduction, "as if they were seen by the reader made to gaze through the wrong end of a telescope."  However, it is also true, as he says, that we are "taken in from the start and carried off by Timmermans' intense, tortured narratives."    Author Paul Di Filippo in his review of this book at Locus says about these stories that

"they all prefigure the deep and subtle psychological horror stories that were to populate the twentieth century and become almost the dominant mode in the twenty-first," 

which in my case, aside from the obscurity of this book and author,  is the attraction.

 Many many thanks to Valancourt for publishing such a fine book and bringing it back into the public eye; kudos to the translator Paul Vincent who didn't seem to miss a single nuance, and also to John Howard for his informative and excellent introduction.   Readers of modern horror may find it a bit tame, but as a lover of the old and especially of the obscure, I loved every dark second of it, and found it to be the perfect  book for late-night, book-light-only reading. All that was missing (and pardon the cliché but it works) was the raging thunderstorm outside.

Reader beware -- space yourself between stories and do not read them all at once.  Di Filippo refers to Timmermans at the time he wrote these tales as a "kind of Thomas Ligotti," and trust me, there's a reason for the comparison.