The Last Canterbury Tales

Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay / November 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 168 pp. / 978-1-962728-09-6

A window in the night is a terror. I have known people who went crazy just waiting for the nightmare being to emerge from the darkness and press its mortal face to the panes.

After 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his fourteenth-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark, freshly cleansed of their sins, to resume the literary work left unfinished so long before. 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, a sailor scarred by a filthy pinkness, a Mr. Mayeux who is also Uriah Chickenhead, and a madman who once made the mistake of asking after the Uhu. Among them is also 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 a talking cat on his lap, who is none other than E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tomcat Murr.

Drawing on the lineage of British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism, and—with such character names as Mistress Squeak, Dick Wallet, Teddy Ruddle, and old Mr. Pankeydrop—Dickensian humor, Ray spins a series of tales that embody his own distinct mixture of weird Catholic mythology and cosmic horror. 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. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, along with his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and a hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.