Among much else, Heron-Allen (1861-1943) was an authority on violin-making and palmistry, a noted translator of Persian poetry, an expert on barnacles and, notoriously, the author of the controversial and extremely scarce novella, “The Cheetah-Girl.” More about it in a moment.

In the foreword to Heron-Allen’s principal collection, “The Strange Papers of Dr. Blayre,” we learn that Christopher Blayre, the University of Cosmopoli’s registrar, has over the years been the recipient of various manuscripts, “which, by reason of their intimate personal nature . . . were confided to me as records of events which appeared at the time to be of too fantastic and inexplicable a nature to be published by their Recorders.”

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Thus “The Purple Sapphire” — deposited by the Smithsonian professor of mineralogy — describes the malefic influence of an accursed gem, while “The House on the Way to Hell” reveals, through automatic writing, that the university’s recently deceased librarian now oversees the infernal region’s books and manuscripts. In the science-fictional “Aalila,” Cosmopoli’s obsessed astronomer constructs a device based on “photo-telephony,” which permits him to communicate with, and eventually do more than just communicate with, a female being from the planet Venus.

At times Heron-Allen’s storytelling approaches the charm and outrageousness of the many travel tales of Lord Dunsany’s bibulous clubman Joseph Jorkens (who claimed to have once married a mermaid). Still, Cosmopoli’s faculty members frequently come to unhappy ends. A complementary collection titled “Some Women of the University” opens with the account of a young woman torn between a female and male lover and closes with a terrifying encounter at a sinister Austrian inn. It is an unnerving tale mixing erotic enthrallment with pathos and horror.

Even more disturbing, “The Cheetah-Girl” violates multiple sexual taboos. We are hooked with the first paragraph:

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“I have spent a long and very tiring day in London, and I have come home, worn out physically and mentally. But I have settled my worldly affairs, and am, I think, prepared for any eventuality. I am now ready therefore to kill my wife on the first opportunity that offers.”

Cosmopoli’s professor of physiology then adds that, despite his murderous resolution, he remains madly in love with the oddly named Uniqua. He reminisces that on the day they first met, “I crushed her body to me and our lips joined. I thought until then that I knew what it was to be kissed. I did not.”

Originally published in 1923, “The Cheetah-Girl” touches on prostitution, homosexuality, miscegenation, orgies, pedophilia, artificial insemination, bestiality, abortion and extraordinary amorous ecstasy. Little wonder that the story proved too shocking for commercial circulation and was only printed in an author’s edition of 20 copies. In fact, it’s far more poignant than titillating and, at heart, an indictment of the coldly scientific mind-set.

While Edward Heron-Allen is an appealing writer of weird fiction, Jean Ray (1887-1964) is a great one. Over the years Ray produced every kind of uncanny tale and more than a hundred adventures of Harry Dickson, “the American Sherlock Holmes,” as well as one novel, “Malpertuis,” a masterpiece of European fantastika (superbly translated by Iain White for Atlas Press).

Till recently, however, this Belgian author’s many “strange stories”— written in French — have been hard to come by in English. Happily, Wakefield Press has inaugurated a program to publish, in chronological order, Scott Nicolay’s fresh translations of Ray’s dozen or so collections. Last fall’s “Whiskey Tales” offered relatively simple shockers — the stuff of “Tales from the Crypt” comics — such as “One Night in Camberwell” (struggle with an invisible intruder), “Josuah Gullick, Pawnbroker” (a macabre variant of the biter bit) and “The Cemetery Guard” (the hideous truth behind a dream job). This spring, however, brings us “Cruise of Shadows,” which contains nothing but masterpieces, notably “The Gloomy Alley” and “The Mainz Psalter.”

In general, Ray’s stories are characterized by short punchy paragraphs, the use of documents and newspaper reports, sudden shifts of narrative perspective, and a pervasive atmosphere of menace and approaching doom. The meanings of his mature stories, though, are seldom made explicit. In “The Mainz Psalter” a ship, hired by a supposed schoolmaster, sails from this world into another dimension or plane of being, where its crew confronts squid-like Lovecraftian entities and horrific elements adapted from William Hope Hodgson’s comparably unsettling short novel, “The Ghost Pirates.”

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Despite the bland title, “The Gloomy Alley” quickly grows Escher-like in its vertiginous twists and turns. In the first section, the residents of a Hamburg household suddenly feel “fear” in certain rooms, then either disappear or turn up savagely murdered. In its second section, an impoverished teacher discovers a narrow street that only he can see or enter. Inside he finds doors to three houses, from which he purloins various artifacts for which a local pawnbroker will pay almost any price. Eventually, these two seemingly unrelated narratives merge, though their full meaning is revealed only in a coda.

Even though Jean Ray grounds his mature fiction in the ordinary here-and-now of waterfront bars and cheap rooming houses, it periodically hints at or crosses over into what he called “intercalary worlds,” other dimensions or realities. Maurice Renard, author of the much-filmed horror classic, “The Hands of Orlac,” famously called Ray the Belgian Poe, though at times he seems more the Belgian Lovecraft. Neither comparison seems exaggerated, given the poetry and imaginative power of his haunting, mind-boggling stories.

Michael Dirda reviews books each Thursday in Style.

THE COMPLETE SHORTER FICTION

By Edward Herron-Allen

Snuggly Books. 580 pp. $36

CRUISE OF SHADOWS

By Jean Ray