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Rating: The Maleficent Carousel is a collection of stories by Jean Ray, originally published by Marabout in 1964 (shortly before his death) and now reissued by Agenzia Alcatraz in the Bizarre series. Here we find the Flemish writer still capable of writing some stories worthy of a fantastic writer of his caliber. In my opinion, his masterpiece remains the extraordinary collection published by Marabout in 1961, The Twenty-Five Best Noir and Fantastic Stories, which contains his best work. The hope (considering that the original edition published in Italy by Baldini & Castoldi in 1936 fetches around 200 Euros on the collectors' market) is that the publisher will make this volume available in the future as well.
In The Maleficent Carousel, the atmospheres combine the fantastic, the unusual, and the bizarre with undoubtedly strong images, such as the one where a wooden carousel horse proves to be a monstrous creature. There is also a touch of black humor, so much so that one might be tempted to define the stories in this anthology as (to quote Poe) Jean Ray’s "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque". Kudos, therefore, to the publisher Agenzia Alcatraz (brand Tsunami) for finally offering, in the Bizarre series, the works of the writer from Ghent.
As Max Baroni rightly writes in the introduction to this book, "the bourgeois world is repeatedly poked fun at, both protagonist and backdrop of several of the stories—even the most surreal—that are narrated here. To achieve this, one element on which Ray insists particularly is surely food, an essential asset that here is distorted into a symbol of ostentation, sloth, and in some cases, it is even the cause of the protagonists’ downfall."
"Croquemitaine" is, in my opinion, one of the best stories in this anthology, steeped in the dark European legends concerning this kind of ogre known in France as Croquemitaine. The protagonist, Albin Tuyle, travels from Belgium to Paris to attend Professor Aristide Sainthomme’s lecture focused on this creature. Once there, he meets up with two other characters, an Englishman and a German. But soon the plot begins to sink into the surreal and the bizarre and, once lost in the night in the French countryside without knowing where to go, the three (plus the driver) find refuge in the professor’s house. The ending will be surprising and surreal in its cruelty. In "Higher Mathematics" and "The Tesseract", the discussion shifts to the fourth dimension, which might remind one of Lovecraft's "Beyond the Wall of Sleep". Also noteworthy is "The Illustrious People of Tudor Street" where the theme of food recurs, ensnaring the poor door-to-door book salesman, Catermole, by the servitude (two servants and two maids) of Mrs. Patricia Bodley (a collector of wax statues of replicas of famous men). Then, there’s also "The Spider Suite," consisting of 6 very short stories based on the figure of the spider.
Highly recommended to followers of European fantastic literature.
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