The rest of his output is apparently devoid of it when American pulp purveyor Weird Tales published a couple of his more venomous tales in ‘30s, they simply edited a few slurs out of the text and it read fine. There is no hint that Ray ever followed any of his race hate seriously – he joined no party or clique and he seems to have never expressed any public admiration for homegrown fascists like Degrelle.
It corrupts the quick disposal chute of several of his better three-to-five page cracks with a laser-like hatred too surgical for the goofy guignol and chipboard medievalism of proper contes cruels. For one thing, his cheap misanthropy is far more ropey EC than hip Augustinianism, and his bitchy Jew-baiting reveals a suburban racism less psychotic than Céline’s but nastier than Archie Bunker’s. Whisky Tales, expertly translated by sage Scott Nicolay and bound in a suitable formaldehyde and psychedelic wrap, places Ray in several trashy genres without forcing him into the Manson-Barker-Ligotti line of contemp nouvelle bizarre. His partly deranged Verne riff, The Mainz Psalter, is probably the only real successor to Poe’s Pym and has wormed its way, buried treasure-like, into several pb horror collections over the years (it does not appear here). Ray is a weird case among the weirds: more than half hack, some part artist, and more parts scam artist. The solitary trash collector just can’t win. And when it recognizes itself as ‘pulp’, it becomes a million tentacles of Tarantino working big-budget bourgeois brut. When it is recognized, pulp ceases to be pulp. These skyrocketing prices might be the revenge of despised dime dreadfuls on the dreary middle brow, but the old pulp time-killer is now dependent on Amazon to valorize it. Previous bulk translations of his seashod horrors were mostly expensive small print-run affairs, so Wakefield Press’ new series of chronological reprints saves the wallet of the weird aficionado from deluxe fetish products or a dog-eared Berkeley paperback at $100.
Jean Ray, Jean Flanders, Raymundus Joannes de Kremer and sometime Harry Dickson – all subsumed under the name Jean Ray, embezzler and premiere avant pulp novelist of Belgium author of Malpertuis which was made into a film starring Orson Welles admired by Queneau and Resnais friend of Ghelderode pulp machine and comic book scenarist on the skids ‘a man sinister… nothing… not even a minister’ as he styled himself up in his epitaph – is finally getting his English due thanks to an affordable edition of his first book, Whisky Tales.
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