![]() ![]() We then come to Malpertuis itself, inhabited by a dying magus who holds various relatives and acquaintances in his thrall. His ship lost, the mariner in his delirium relates his vision to his rescuers, one of whom, a malignant priest, repays the information the sailor provides by having him strangled and cast into the stormy froth. There is a storm worthy of Poe, Coleridge, or Lautremont, and an ancient mariner glimpses, above the rocks of the island, gigantic and repulsive corpses. The proper story begins with a ship seemingly lost at sea, in search of a mysterious Aegean island that appears on no charts. A prologue describes the discovery by a thief of a collection of manuscripts hidden away in an ancient Belgian abbey. ![]() The narrative is epistolary, with four or five persons contributing to the arc of the story. (I also became reacquainted with an ancient structure riddled with hidden passageways that has haunted my dreams since childhood.) Characterized by the publisher as a “modern Gothic novel”, this book does indeed reflect the conventions of that genre: a sprawling house exuding evil, a cast of strange characters, a naïve protagonist, and a sense of overpowering malignancy casting its shadow over the proceedings. ![]() I read Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis (1943) over the course of two evenings, and each night I experienced strange dreams of forgotten identity. ![]()
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