· If Malpertuis and the happenings there, as recounted by Jean-Jacques, are mysterious and chilling, the explanation behind it all is a flight of fancy of a whole different order. Ray's conception is not one of a merely haunted and cursed house of your typical horror-novel sort, but rather a much grander, wilder one. MALPERTUIS. By JEAN RAY (Atlas Press; /98) Although it wasn’t published in English until (in an edition now sadly out of print), Jean Ray’s MALPERTUIS is one of the great novels of supernatural horror. It’s the endlessly complex, deeply hallucinatory account of the eccentric inhabitants of an accursed mansion known as Malpertuis, who spend their days bickering and playing games—at least . Jean Ray brilliantly upends the haunted-house tradition in this widely acclaimed puzzlebox of a novel. A reinvention of the Gothic novel and an established classic of fantastic literature, Malpertuis is as inventive and gripping today as when it first appeared in French in the dark year of Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery/5(11).
Malpertuis was turned into a film with Orson Welles. Summation: Jean Ray was a master of the weird tale. He had prodigious imagination. Malpertuis stands with "The House of Usher" as an edifice of horror. "The Mainz Psalter" is as terrifying a voyage as the one to the Mountains of Madness. Jean Ray brilliantly upends the haunted-house tradition in this widely acclaimed puzzlebox of a novel. A reinvention of the Gothic novel and an established classic of fantastic literature, Malpertuis is as inventive and gripping today as when it first appeared in French in the dark year of Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a. Jean Ray Translated, with an introduction, by Scott Nicolay. Published only a few months after hiss better-known Malpertuis, The City of Unspeakable Fear is Jean Ray's only other novel, and one that plays at the margins of the ghost story and the detective novel. A series of inexplicable deaths take place in rapid secession in the improbably.
Malpertuis is Jean Ray’s most famous work, a reinvention of the Gothic novel and an established classic of fantastic literature that is as inventive and gripping today as when it first appeared in French in the dark year of Malpertuis tells its gloomy tale by means of a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery. Jean Ray, where have you been all my life? Malpertuis is a complex and at times confusing novel, but it's also a fantastic one, full of exactly the kind of stuff that I love in my weird fiction, as well as the kind of stuff that I love in my Gothic fiction. The ultimate solution to the mystery is obvious, but somehow getting there never feels like it is, and the whole production has such an ominous, almost apocalyptic quality that everything is carried along with a kind of breathless urgency. Jean Ray published this book in amid the oblivion of war, an oblivion it seems destiny shall forever cast about Malpertuis, one of those books so dangerous, so mythical, that if it were placed amid the dusty "classics" of an American bookstore it would incinerate the entire building with one quick flip of its pages.
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