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Rating: The Toad Cellar is one of the most significant books by the Belgian writer Thomas Owen and is now being reissued by the publishing house Agenzia Alcatraz (a publishing house very connected with Tsunami editions. Recently I talked about the biography of Lovecraft by Paul Roland. Here's the link to their website https://www.agenziaalcatraz.it/). The preface is by his friend Jean Ray, the so-called European Lovecraft. Thomas Owen is today considered, along with the aforementioned Jean Ray and Gérard Prévot, as one of the pillars of Belgian fantastic literature. The stories in this anthology are those in which the Belgian writer fully dedicates himself to narrating fear.
Among the stories that impressed me the most, I mention “Dust You Were,” a very macabre tale where, in a small village, there is the custom of celebrating funerals in a very particular way by burying people alive. Also notable is the short story “The Disconsolate Presence” where the protagonist, a traveler crossing a desolate landscape, finds shelter in a decrepit and abandoned farm in which he seems to glimpse, inside, the face of a person with a suffering appearance sitting on a chair. Once inside, everything seems in a state of abandonment and decay. The person he glimpsed seems to have left no trace, but in an unexpected way, he finally sees her outside. He will discover to his dismay that he has freed her by sitting in her place and in doing so, he condemns himself to immobility in that ruined and cursed house. “15-12-38” is, in my view, his most powerful story: the protagonist Petrus Wilger, a man of law, receives a mysterious letter from a child emerging from a mysterious green door located on the street in front of his office. In the letter, he is asked to call the number 15-12-38. The subsequent events will be dramatic and lead Petrus Wilger to live through a real nightmare. The aforementioned green door seems to appear and disappear and provides access to a “hypergeometric” room belonging to the fourth dimension. There are possible connections with Jean Ray's masterpiece story “The Tenebrous Alley” (“La ruelle ténébreuse”).
The use of a particular “bestiary” in some of these stories represents an effective metaphor of the perversity and erotic phobia inherent in human beings and reconnects the Belgian writer to the "popular" fantastic. Thus in “Father and Daughter” a father, for some unspecified reason, takes a train journey to punish his “bitch” of a daughter. During the journey, he has a long fight with a bitch that suddenly appears, which he finally manages to kill. Once he arrives at the village where his daughter lives, he discovers that she has committed suicide. Instead, in “The Toad Cellar” we find an abbot who discovers he has the power to kill toads. Obsessed with these animals, he breeds numerous different species in the cellar like a perverse collector. In the meantime, he studies esoteric texts and convinces himself that he can extend his power even to human beings. But it will be precisely the encounter with another toad that shatters his beliefs and plunges him into a catatonic state.
Ultimately, we are faced with an author absolutely worth rediscovering for those who love a certain type of non-Anglo-Saxon fantastic literature.
https://www.agenziaalcatraz.it/
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