Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.
This week, we’re reading Jean Ray’s “The Mainz Psalter,” first published as “le Psautier de Mayence” in Le Bien Public in May 1930, and translated into English by Lowell Blair for the Ghouls in My Grave collection in 1965. Spoilers ahead.
“That man makes me think of an unscalable wall behind which something immense and terrible is taking place.”
Summary
Ballister lies dying aboard the trawler North Caper, telling the tale of his last voyage.
Ballister meets the schoolmaster, owner of the schooner Mainz Psalter, in a bargeman’s tavern. The schoolmaster inherited the ship’s namesake book, the second out of Gutenberg’s press, from a great-uncle. It’s worth the price of—an excellent sea-worthy schooner. Ballister proposes himself as captain and an eccentric crew: Turnip, a good sailor powered by rum; Steevens, a powerful, taciturn Fleming; Walker, missing half his face; and Jellewyn, rumored royalty in hiding, and his devoted servant Friar Tuck. The schoolmaster directs Ballister to sail from northwestern Scotland to obscure Big Toe Bay, where the schoolmaster will join them.
Ballister knows Big Toe Bay, a wilderness visited by few but coastal scavengers. From there they’ll sail west, says the schoolmaster, through little-trafficked, hazardous waters. But not for any criminal purpose—the schoolmaster’s business is scientific. Only one incident gives Ballister pause: A down-and-out seaman sees the schoolmaster in the tavern, and rushes out gin-less in terror.
The Psalter’s peaceful layover in the Bay is shattered by gunfire from wreck-scavengers in the surrounding cliffs. Then one wrecker screams and falls 300 feet to the beach. Two more follow, flung by some monstrous force. Jellewyn calls Friar Tuck, good as a hunting dog for scenting danger. Tuck pales: There’s something ugly up there. He spots it, then it’s gone. Moments later, the schoolmaster descends to the beach.
The schoolmaster secludes himself in his cabin with books, coming topside only to take the sun with a sextant. Life is monotonous yet tense. One day everyone is seized with violent nausea—poison?—but it passes quickly. Not so the general apprehension. On their eighth day out, the crew demand to know where the schoolmaster’s taking them. Friar Tuck, spider sense tingling, says there’s something around them worse than even death. And the schoolmaster is “not alien to it.”
Jellewyn’s elected to talk to the schoolmaster, but he’s vanished! That night Jellewyn points out the sky to Ballister, who falls to his knees in astonishment. The stars are all wrong, new constellations. The erudite Jellewyn launches into a lesson in “hypergeometry” and speculates about other dimensions.
There seems no good in turning back with no familiar stars to guide them. Walker takes the helm while the rest crowd into Ballister’s cabin to drink rum punch. Morale rises. Then there’s a terrible cry from above, followed by a far-off yodel. Topside, Walker’s gone. Turnip is next, shot through the air from the mainmast, coming down far off in the waves. A gray, glass-like something steals the lifeboat before they can deploy it. Jellewyn and Tuck find the rigging splattered with blood.
Buy the Book
Middlegame
Ballister and Jellewyn take the night watch. A bloody glow illuminates the sea, and the water goes transparent. They see the ocean floor covered in “dark masses with unreal shapes…manors with immense towers, gigantic domes, horribly straight streets lined with frenzied houses…a swarming crowd of amorphous beings engaged in…feverish and infernal activity.”
Jellewyn jerks Ballister back: An immense creature rises from the undersea city! It strikes the schooner’s keel, rears tentacles three times taller than the mainmast, glares with eyes of liquid amber. Then the awesome vision goes vague. The red glow snaps out.
Next morning Ballister tries to take a sextant reading. A “white streamer” quivers in front of him, delivers a jarring blow to his head. He goes down, barely conscious. Regaining his senses, he finds Jellewyn alive but bereft of his Tuck. Steevens is a swollen bag of crushed bones, barely breathing. This is the end.
The three hide in Ballister’s cabin while, overnight, unimaginable sailors tramp the decks and direct the schooner. Learning about the schoolmaster’s books, Jellewyn goes to study them. He returns to ask if the schoolmaster ever spoke of a crystal box.
Next morning, Steevens is dead and Jellewyn gone. He has left a note saying he must go up the mainmast to see something. If the act’s fatal, Ballister must burn all the schoolmaster’s books, no matter what tries to stop him. Ballister piles the books on deck, soaks them with gasoline, strikes the match. Pale flame rises, and—there’s a cry from the sea!
In the Psalter’s wake swims the schoolmaster, eyes burning. He’ll make Ballister the richest man on earth! He’ll inflict hellish tortures on him! Something pulls the schooner toward the sea bottom.
A crystal box appears among the burning pages. The schoolmaster stands on the water. It’s the greatest knowledge of all you’re destroying, he shrieks. Ballister crushes the box under his heel and collapses into a chaos of sea and sky.
He wakes on the North Caper. He’s told all and will die happily among men, on earth.
So ends Ballister’s story. The rest is told by John Copeland, first mate of the Caper. They’ve fished Ballister from the cold north sea. He looks to live. But that night a clerically clad figure with burning eyes climbs aboard, attacks Ballister, then leaps back into the sea. Copeland shoots the clergyman and retrieves his body—but gets only clothes and a wax head and hands!
Ballister’s been stabbed twice. The bleeding cannot be staunched. He recognizes the remains of his attacker as “The schoolmaster!” Six days later, he dies.
Reverend Leemans, who knows many secrets of the sea, has examined the mysterious remains. He points out the smell clinging to them: formic acid, phosphorus—like an octopus! On the last day of Creation, Leemans notes, God will cause the Blasphemous Beast to appear. Let us not anticipate destiny with impious inquiries.
And so, the seamen agree, better to let this mystery rest.
What’s Cyclopean: New stars shine in a “sidereal abyss.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Jellewyn’s nobility is treated as a source of impressive power and insight, but Ray generally manages to avoid the sort of ethnic shorthand that frequently plagues shipboard ensembles.
Mythos Making: Sail in strange polar waters, and tentacled monsters shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
Libronomicon: From the early days of the printing press to Reines’s “short-lived literary magazines,” books are trouble this week.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Jellewyn and Ballister see all sorts of terrible sites alone on deck, and frequently state that these sites would drive the rest of the crew mad. Not them, though. They’re fine.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Tentacled monsters in far corners of the ocean. Treacherous results of polar scientific expeditions. Things man was not meant to know, with the dangers of that knowledge pointedly and explicitly underscored. And yet, somehow, no evidence whatsoever that Ray/De Kremer and Lovecraft ever so much as read each others’ stories. Conclusions: 1) the late 20s were just scary tentacle time, and authors worldwide were gonna tentacle, and 2) our Flemish friend should join Lovecraft and Sakutaro in that Dreamlands café, where he and Sakutaro can at least talk with each other if Howard is too scared of their foreign selves to join in.
The commonality that interests me the most is that knowledge-as-horror thing. Lovecraft was never above (below?) a bit of Christian symbolism, but he was no believer himself and his cosmic horror universe is overtly non-Christian. And not just in a the god-I-don’t-believe-in-is-Jesus way, but a genuinely different, the-god-it-would-take-to-explain-this-universe-is-actually-pretty-alarming, cosmology. And yet, learn anything about life outside your little protected garden, and all human safety and well-being could shatter in an instant. (Or at least, all Anglo safety; everyone else already knows and is trying to break in, ahhhh the horror, etc.)
Ray’s story, on the other hand, is overtly Christian, down to the hints that the 4th-dimensional destroyer is the Great Beast Leviathan who shall rise at the end of days (and about whom you can learn more a few posts over in the Good Omens reread). And down to the point about Things Man Was Not Etc. coming from a priest, who comes in last minute just to tell the framing narrator to quit asking questions. But knowledge-as-danger is a motif throughout. The Psalter’s voyage is sponsored by a malevolent figure often called the schoolmaster. And his books, source of occult knowledge, must be burned to return to the world as we know it.
The Psalter itself is intriguingly named. Did the schoolmaster (possibly a servant of Leviathan, possibly a puppet of the Beast Itself) actually find and sell a convenient copy of the second book ever to come out of Gutenberg’s printing press? And is the point that even the most holy books can be used for sinister ends, or that said schoolmaster rejected the wisdom of the original psalter in favor of darker studies? Or is the press itself, that permits such wide distribution of all kinds of knowledge, inherently suspect?
Another, intriguing interpretation is that psalter was the press’s second creation. As the dimension in which the crew find themselves is… a second creation? Both within the story itself, and in the Tolkien-ish sense.
Back to the Lovecraft-Ray non-connection—I really can’t spot much room for real-life influence. Even leaving aside the likely lack of regular translation between French and English-language weird fiction at the time, “The Call of Cthulhu” came out in ’28. Ray/De Kremer was in prison from 1927 to 1929, during which time he wrote this story. (He was in for embezzlement, alas, which somewhat undermines the writerly cred he might have gotten for pounding out stories while doing time for blasphemy or some similarly literary crime.) [ETA: But see Anne’s finding below—it’s literary after all!] He publishes today’s piece in Le Bien Public in 1930, and “Mountains of Madness” comes out in ’31, so no room in that direction either.
But there are many earlier doomed voyages to have their third-factor influence on all. The one that came to mind for me was the marginally-more-likely-to-have-been-read Moby Dick. ‘And I alone survive to tell the tale’ of following an obsessed leader way too close to a mythical sea monster. Maybe don’t do that.
Final note: Like Sakutaro, Ray gives us an excellent all-purpose refusal: “I’m in no mood to give you a lesson in hypergeometry.” My e-mail recipients may expect to hear this often.
Anne’s Commentary
In his essay “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray,” Antonio Monteiro writes: “There is apparently nothing to prove (or to disprove) that Jean Ray was acquainted with Lovecraft’s work, despite the fact that they were contemporaries. But, coincidental as they probably are…some similarities can be found.” For example, Monteiro points out, their mutual fascinations for parallel worlds. True! Let me throw out more evidence that Jean and Howard were spiritual brethren of the imagination:
- Jean Ray is a pen name. The writer’s real name is Raymundus Joannes de Kremer. Tell me that isn’t the natural-born moniker of someone who’d pen ponderous tomes of forbidden knowledge for Howard’s grimoire shelf.
- In 1926, in reference to the disastrous mismanagement of a literary magazine, Ray was imprisoned for embezzlement and served two years, during which time he wrote this week’s story! (Okay, so this doesn’t have much to do with law-abiding Howard, but it’s a cool fact, right?)
- Undersea cities, with octopoid denizens! Ray’s Ballister is especially horrified by the straight streets of his “R’lyeh.” Hmm. Also by the fierce bustle of those denizens. Makes me think of the modernized Paris of broad boulevards, or Lang’s Metropolis, or even Howard’s New York (and Red Hook.)
- Strange stars overhead are the stuff of madness. Also undersea cephalopod cities. Unless you are a Anglo-Saxon of superior education, like Jellewyn and Ballister. The rest of the crew must be protected from these new upsetting truths.
- Masks, gloves and clothes can so disguise very much inhuman creatures so as to fool humans into thinking the creatures are other humans. This works for octopi. This also works for Mi-Go. Human dupes are invariably shocked to discover the ruse.
- There are things man is better off not investigating, a comfortable ignorance he is far better off embracing, whether out of piety or the instinct for self-preservation. On the one hand, you don’t want to make God mad. On the other, you don’t want to find out that the only god is a howling chaos of universal indifference.
I found “The Mainz Psalter” stronger—very strong!—in its details than in its overall plot coherence. The schoolmaster is too much of an enigma for me. He starts out seeming altogether human through the tavern scene. Still human, though withdrawn, through his disappearance at sea. Thereafter some sort of octopus puppet or mannequin. The purpose of the Greenland-ward trip and the crystal box are over-vague—I think they don’t matter to Ray. It’s the voyage itself he cares about, with its eccentric crew so brilliantly delineated, with its terrors so deftly heightened and its mystery deepened by dimensions unknown though perilously near.
Yes, Howard and Jean could certainly agree about that last bit.
Next week, a tale of Lovecraftian revenge in Michael Shea’s “Nemo Me Impune Lacessit.”
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
It’s quite good, though perhaps just a touch “arty”. Lovecraft, for all his cultural pretension, gleefully wrote the sort of pulpy stuff that the “right people” sneered at. Ray seems to be trying to bring a lot more symbolism and meaning.
As the crew suddenly found themselves sailing under alien stars, my first reaction was to think of Hastur and Carcosa. The octopodes and undersea city then point more to Cthulhu, while the wax hands and mask suggest Mi-Go. Ray, of course, knew of none of this (indeed much of it was not yet known to HPL at the time), but there are plenty of hooks to tie them together for those who want to dabble in Lovecraft’s playground.
I don’t know if there’s any intended significance to the choice of the Mainz Psalter. It is a significantly rarer work than Gutenberg’s bibles with only 10 in existence and so worth a lot more. It also wasn’t printed by Gutenberg, but by a couple of his apprentices who had split with him. In the text of the story, there seems to be some indication that sailors see the name as ill-omened for a ship, I guess because of the religious connotations.
Raymundus Joannes de Kremer sounds good at first blush, but it’s fairly typical for Flemish and Dutch. As late as a generation or two after Jean Ray, they still went for those hifalutin’ Latinate names (still do in some families) and “de Kremer” just means “the merchant” thus corresponding to names like Merchant or Chapman. Horribly prosaic.
The story does leave a lot of dropped threads and unanswered questions. Why the reaction by the seaman in the tavern to the schoolmaster? What was his actual plan? Why the smuggler’s bay? Still, it was good enough for me to want to seek out some more of Ray’s work.
What is so horrible about straight streets? We see them all the time, and apart from litter and Seattle’s famously awful traffic, they aren’t horrific than I can tell. Perhaps the person describing them thus simply wasn’t expecting to see anything like that in the sea, but still.
I am reminded of the scene in Men in Black where the humanoid alien turns out to be a tiny alien piloting a human suit. In context watching the movie, this is unexpected but not impossible to believe. Is that how my grandparents would have felt about a squid with a wax head being social in a bar? I would love to ask them that question.
Hi
A nice tale, I do agree with Anne’s comment “The schoolmaster is too much of an enigma for me” I would have liked the character to be fleshed out a bit more. I also agree with the comment above that it would be helpful to know the reason for the reactions of the seaman in the tavern to the schoolmaster. It seems to hint at a back story that never appears. I did not see much similarity to Lovecraft here, unless it is the rather silly masquerade from “Whisperer in Darkness” which did not appear until 1931. I seem to see more of the influence of the sea stories of William Hope Hodgson. Lots of interesting bits but a number of the characters and scenes are not really developed.
I am happy to see you are tackling Shea’s “Nemo Me Impune Lacessit.” next I did enjoy it, especially the roses.
Happy Reading
Guy
@2 Clearly you’ve never been to Paris. ;)
The majority of Old World cities, even moreso at the time the story was written, were not laid out in a grid pattern as most cities in the US are (though the grid pattern has become more common in modern times). As a result, twisty, angular and occasionally even circular city streets would have been the norm for the author.
Just for example, there are parts of Paris where the streets are laid out in a radial pattern instead of a grid, with various streets stretching out from a central roundabout like the spokes of a wagon wheel, but the geometry is usually far from exact, and you still get streets intersecting at weird, unexpected points. I’m not necessarily surprised that the author would find straight streets unusual or even other-worldly as a result, though this is a detail that has clearly lost most of its significance in modern times.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh I love this so much i’m going to explode.
Or something.
Oh god what was the crystal box.
Oookay, this is wierd but this story might have a mythological tie in- specifically the Schoolmaster and the box.
There is a Sumerian myth about Inanna (who later became Ishtar, who later became the foam-born Aphrodite). You can find a good translation in Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer’s book Inanna, which is basically just all of the then availible myths about Inanna, in the section called Hanna and the God of Wisdom.
The Sumerian God of Wisdom was named Enki or Ea. He lived in a house/land, the Abzu, that was sometimes described as moving over the surface of the water from place to place, and was sometimes drawn as a square with Enki standing in it with waves on all four sides- which is a little wierd since most Sumerian drawings that I have ever seen present their subjects from the side, with the ground under their feet and the sky over their heads- combined with the fact that Enki’s servants (the seven sages) are sometimes portrayed as fish with legs and arms (I literally have a craft beer coaster of this and it’s in Samuel Noah Kramer’s stuff somewhere too)- almost makes it look like Enki’s house might sometimes go under the water as well. I mean, it’s glossed as “the watery abyss”.
The myth goes like this. One day, Lady Inanna set out to visit Enki in his home. Enki’s visor, Ismud, showed her in and Enki was super happy to see her (Inanna being flamingly hot is mentioned repeatedly in the poem). The two of them started drinking. Enki had in fact invented beer. It was his thing. Enki was apparently a super happy friendly drunk, and started giving Inanna stuff. Specifically, specifically, he started giving her the “Me”s which was the Sumerian name for the knowledges of the various arts of civilization. He ended up giving her all the Mes- all of them- knowledge of everything- from law giving, recordkeeping and poetry, to prositution, family structures, slandering and straightforward language, to the wearing of clothes and hairdressing.
Inanna, who for whatever reason was considerably less drunk than Enki, had the Me s loaded like cargo- like stacks of physical objects-(so possibly envisioned as the kind of tablets that the Sumerian wrote on?) onto the Ship of Heaven she had arrived in and started hightailing it out of there.
When Enki finally sobered up, he noticed the Me s were gone, and asked Ismud what happened. When Ismud told Enki what he had done while drunk, Enki was horrified and sent Ismud after Inanna before she could get to land. Ismud attacked Inanna repeatedly with various kinds of weirdass monsters that the Sumerians knew about and the rest of us don’t: enkum-creatures, lahama sea-monsters, flying uru-giants, a ‘sound-piercing kugalgal’.
So, the kinds of things most librarians send after overdue books, right?
However, Enki’s servant Ismud is apparently not as powerful as Inanna’s servant Ninshubur, Queen of the East, and Ninshubur, standing on the deck of the Ship of Heaven, foils Ismud’s creatures at all points.
Inanna arrives safely back in her city of Uruk with all of the Holy Me s and bestows the arts of civilization upon the people.
Apparently with not too much hard feeling from Enki, who later rescues Inanna from the Netherworld when she impetuously decides to visit her sister in the land of the dead.
In Sumerian mythology, Enki is the deity who created human kind. Before Inanna scheisted him out of his Me s , he was also the deity who was teaching humans civilization. Also. Beer making. And stuff.
In Ray’s story- is the problem that all knowledge is contained in the box and the knowledge is of things too unknowable and scary to for anyone to know?
Or is it that all knowledge is contained in the box, including all familiar knowledge that makes human life work…
…and the Schoolteacher is withdrawing that knowledge from humanity?
Taking it back to his home in the sea, where it came from in the first place?
I believe these myths had just become available through British and German scholarship around the turn of the century, so its possible for Jean to have been aware of them…
And wasn’t this written, like, just a few years before the stock market crashed and the great depression began? And the eventual rise of both Stalin and the Nazis?
If this person Jean was farsighted enough to realize a collapse was coming, the withdrawal of all knowledge could make a lot of sense as a theme.
I love that myth, and hadn’t made that connection at all! I like the idea of the schoolmaster sneaking off to an alternate universe with the me. Though it does make me more more annoyed with the total absence of female characters, since “Where is Inanna in all this?” suddenly becomes a much more interesting question.
The me (I’ve heard Wolkstein pronounce it “may”) are interesting in how they’re presented across the myths. They’re arts of civilization–everything from the giving of laws to dressing up to seduce someone, all the complexity for good and ill that differentiates life in a city from life in a monkeysphere-sized tribe. They’re also physical objects, stackable in Inanna’s boat, but later her jewelry and breastplate and other accouterments of power that she takes off in order to enter the underworld. So basically, a goddess clothed in the stuff of civilization–one of my favorite mythical images.
@3 et al
“Squid with a wax head in a bar”
I hope we’re all familiar with the ongoing adventures of Sam Starfall – terrifying because he’s [it’s?] so FRIENDLY…
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ffdex.htm
Vbob @9
…and gut-wrenchingly horrible to look at, yes. Although he’s not really trying to pass for human.
The schoolmaster’s motivations still puzzle me. Is he trying to deliver the books and the box somewhere? If so, why complicate/endanger things by killing off the crew? (Perhaps he has no impulse control, and it’s like eating chips – “once you pop, you can’t stop.”)
R. Emrys @@@@@ 8
This is a bit forward of a question, but given the Aphra-Aphrodite-Inanna thing- are you thinking of restoring the goddess to the mythos?
Because that would be cool. Sort of in the way earthquakes are.
I apologize for going on so in the first comment. Any excuse for exposing the masses to educational information/ propaganda on ancient Sumer is an excuse I take.
If you liked this, then do check out Malpertuis, a Harry Kumel film from the 70s based on the book by Jean Ray. It’s also known as The Legend of Doom House, but in a slightly different cut. The ’73 version is best but it doesn’t have Orson Welles’ voice.
And a new translation of Ray’s Whisky Tales is being released: https://www.wakefieldpress.com/ray_whiskey.html. I’m not sure why the extra e.
Or did you already talk about the goddess, and someone has been too much of an a*hole to read Winter Tide before asking the question?!?
The plot thickens.
Tegan Dee @@@@@ 11 & 14: I imagine that the Mythosian deities and archetypes have as much interplay with, and influence on, other human pantheons as those pantheons do with each other. None of the Mythosian goddesses seems a very close cognate for Inanna or Aphrodite, though–maybe Shub-Nigaroth comes closest? She can certainly manage the earthquakes, either on her own or in cooperation with Yig and Hydra and maybe Nyarlathotep when they’re in a particularly female mood.
Aphra’s name is originally Puritan and means “ashes”; unless the Puritans knew something I don’t, the similarity to Aphrodite’s name is unfortunately coincidental.
Now, though, I’m thinking about how Deep Ones would handle the descent into the underworld, given that going down into dark places already has *very* positive connotations.
I am sorry I did not run across this earlier, as I am currently polishing a fresh translation of this tale for the second volume of Ray’s stories in English from Wakefield Press. The first volume, Whiskey Tales, will be out in three weeks.
Ray definitely read Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates in La Revue Belge before writing “Le Psautier de Mayence,” and someone almost certainly described “The Call of Cthulhu” to him while he was in prison, but the specificity of his borrowing from the former compared to the obliquity of any parallels to the latter suggest he did not read Lovecraft. Seven of Ray’s stories did appear in English translations in Weird Tales and other American pulps in the mid-’30s.
My suspicion is that the original story was much simpler, and set primarily in or near the Minch, but Ray enlarged his concept after encountering the ideas of Hodgson and Lovecraft. He probably intended it as part of his abandoned second collection Rum-Row.
Blair’s translation omits an entire page of the original text, btw.
Never take jobs from strange men you meet in inns. If more protagonists followed that simple rule we’d have fewer hair raising adventures.
Scott Nicolay @@@@@ 16: Very cool background–thank you for sharing! And that’s great that you’ve been working on a new translation; we’ll have to take a look when it’s out and see if the extra page resolves more of our questions.
R. Emrys @@@@@ 15
My apologies. I get my internet mostly through my phone- it’s pretty spotty about letting me have access to the comment section. If I get in long enough to comment, I rarely ever see if there has been a reply.
And until I noticed this particular one, I also didn’t realize it was a thing that might happen!
Ashes- one wonders why Deep Ones would use fire related nouns as names, again, I probably just haven’t gotten to the explanation yet. No spoilers now :)
Yeah, Ishtar doesn’t correlate well with the Lovecraftian deities. I sometimes wonder what he would have made of the Artemis of Ephesus, though- the one with hundreds of boobies. Even I am tempted to think of that as cosmic horror. What’s the line the X-wing pilot says just before he dies in Star Wars?
“There’s… there’s too many of them!”
And isn’t is depressing? There is a known, finite, number of deities in a fictional universe whose author is dead, but whose main appeal is being and containing infinitely more than humans know?
Just thought you might like to know that Scott Nicolay’s translation of Jean Ray’s Whiskey Tales is now available from publisher Wakefield Press and on Amazon.com, with a translation of Cruise of Shadows forthcoming, and hopefully translations of all the recent Alma Edituer French editions of Jean Ray’s stories to come as well.
My translation of Jean Ray’s second collection, Cruise of Shadows, which includes “The Mainz Psalter,” is now available:
https://www.amazon.com/Cruise-Shadows-Haunted-Stories-Land/dp/193966344X
I’ve just finished reading this (in Kaye’s “Witches and Warlocks” anthology) and my first impression was that it reminded me in some ways as a blend of Hodgson (both “the Ghost Pirates” and “Boats of the Glen Carrig”) and Langan’s “The Fisherman”, including the enigma of just what the Schoolmaster/Fisherman was or what he ultimately hoped to accomplish. After reading perhaps more Aickman than is good for me, it seems somehow appropriate that we don’t know more about what is going on because our 2nd-remove narrator has no idea himself what he really signed on to beyond sail the ship. One side note that intrigues me is the parallel between the schoolmaster’s disguise and that of HPL’s “Whisperer in Darkness”