"Originally published as La cité de l'indicible peur in 1943. This English edition is published by special arrangement with Alma éditeur, France"--Title page verso. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents:
A somber and solitary gentleman. Sidney Terence or Sigma Triggs -- Mr. Doove tells some stories -- Games of the sun and the moon -- Tea with the Pumkins ladies -- The terror on the moor -- Mr. Doove tells some stories -- The passion of Revinus -- Into the pentagram -- The 28 days of Mr. Basket -- A somber and solitary gentleman.
Summary:
"Published in occupied Belgium in the dark year 1943 a few months after his celebrated novel Malpertuis, The City of Unspeakable Fear remains one of Jean Ray's most curious works. Haunting an ambiguous interzone between detective novel, horror fiction and Anglophile parody, it follows the misadventures of presumed police officer Sidney Terence Triggs upon his retirement to the sleepy English country town of Ingersham. A cast of characters worthy of Dickens awaits his transplantation, from the sympathetic old clerk Ebenezer Doove and the three haberdashing Pumkins ladies to the druggist Theobold Pycroft, the eccentric department store owner Gregory Cobwell, the autocratic Major Chadburn, the feared Lady Florence Honnybingle, and a motley collection of other humorously humdrum inhabitants. The emphatically commonplace quickly gives way to haunted melodrama as Triggs's new neighbors begin to die violently or vanish. His false identity as a detective is put to the test under the threat of murderous phantoms as city and citizens come apart at the seams"--Back cover.
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