The Last Canterbury Tales

Drawing on British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism and Dickensian humor, Jean Ray's tales mix Catholic mythology with cosmic horror

After 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his 14th-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark, freshly cleansed of their sins. This time it is a new cast of storytellers picking up where the others had left off-a motley crew that includes a Prioress with a taste for executions and a madman who once made the mistake of asking after the Uhu. Also among them is a new listener: Tobias Weep, secretary of the Upper Thames Book Club, who has stumbled onto their impossible gathering, pinned to his chair by the impossible weight of E.T.A. Hoffmann's talking tomcat on his lap. Jean Ray's The Last Canterbury Tales, first published in French in 1944, makes no pretense of finishing Chaucer's masterpiece but instead works toward a denouement of its own that reveals an unexpected act of storytelling underpinning this collection. Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. A pivotal figure in the "Belgian School of the Strange," he authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, along with his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction.