Robert Bloch became world famous when he wrote Psycho in 1959. The Alfred Hitchcock film had something to do with that. Before that he was a well-respected novelist and short story writer, and eventually moved into television and film. But all that came later. To begin with, he was an acolyte of H. P. Lovecraft. As Sam Moskowitz puts it in The Seekers of Tomorrow (1967): “During this early period of his writing, Bloch was held completely in thrall by Lovecraft. Virtually nothing of his own showed through. Such popularity as he enjoyed was obtained by basking in the reflection of the master.” Only eighteen years old, he sold his first story to Weird Tales, “The Feast in the Abbey” (January 1935). The tale is modeled on Lovecraft’s style and subject matter, with a French nobleman taking refuge in a remote monastery during a storm, waiting for his brother to come take him away. The monks behave in a most unmonk-like way, feasting, drinking and blaspheming. The nobleman joins them for a feast of roasted meat. It is only at the end that Abbot Henricus tells his guest about the Devil’s Monastery, where devil worshipers sing to Satan. He explains the final dish set before him has a terrible secret. “It was the head of my brother.”
Lovecraft’s influence can be seen everywhere in this tale. First, the heavy atmosphere and fairly liberal adjectives make the pace slow but building in tension. The absence of dialogue, the narrator reporting what others said but never quoting them. And at the end, the big reveal. Not in italics this time but they are coming. Bloch is happy to create a traditional weird tale to Lovecraft’s specifications. This tale can be seen as a version of Lovecraft’s “The Festival” (Weird Tales, January 1925) as well as earlier tales such as Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” (John Silence, 1908).
And the pattern is set. The follow-up to “The Feast in the Abbey” is “The Secret in the Tomb” (Weird Tales, May 1935). In this tale a man inherits a strange secret from his ancestors, a tomb from which all the male heirs have entered but never returned. When the call comes, the narrator too goes into the tomb and meets the lich of his ancient and evil ancestor, Jeremy Strange. The ghoul attempts to feed upon his living kin but the narrator breaks the mental link and destroys the evil carcass. He flees the tomb never to dabble in sorcery again. The plot is simple and familiar, being a version of Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” (The Vagrant, March 1922). Bloch’s atmosphere is good but the story lacks any real plot or a believable struggle between the combatants. The story is of interest only as the first of Bloch’s Cthulhu Mythos tales, mentioning ancient tomes such as The Necronomicon, and his own creation, The Mysteries of the Worm. Bloch would return to ghouls again and again, like his later novel, Strange Eons (1978).
“The Suicide in the Study” (Weird Tales, June 1935) is another short tale shrouded in Cthulhu Mythos dressings, but actually has little to do with Lovecraft. Bloch takes the idea from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) and has his sorcerer, James Alington divide himself by using hypnotism, into his good and evil twins. Unfortunately, Allington doesn’t realize that his good self has shrunk to only a quarter of his being. His evil self is a skull-faced ape creature that attacks him. In fighting off the monster with his silver knife, the dead man appears to be a suicide, despite the ape fingerprints on the dagger. What is significant in his story is Bloch’s interest in the psychology of the mind, a motif that will become the most important part of his contribution to horror.
Just a quick note on Bloch illustrations. Many of the first stories were too short to get images. Later, Bloch was very blessed to have Virgil Finlay draw for most of his stories. Finlay obviously enjoyed the Egyptian motifs that came up often. The other artist to do several was Harold S. De Lay who brought a New York City professionalism to his drawings.
“The Shambler From the Stars” (Weird Tales, September 1935) I consider this story Bloch’s first significant piece. Even though it is a well-written Mythos tale, it is also much more. The language is simpler, a trend that would eventually give Bloch a smooth, flawless style typical of the Californian Writers Group like Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont. The story is also a tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, reiterating HPL’s philosophy about horror writing and his life:
“I wanted to write a real story; not the stereotyped, ephemeral sort of tale I turned out for the magazines, but a real work of art. The creation of such a masterpiece became my ideal. I was not a good writer, but that was not entirely due to my errors in mechanical style. It was, I felt, the fault of my subject matter. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls, mythological monsters—these things constituted material of little merit. Commonplace imagery, ordinary adjectival treatment, and a prosaically anthropocentric point of view were the chief detriments to the production of a really good weird tale.”
All this being said, The Best of Robert Bloch doesn’t contain any of his early stories including “Shambler”. The earliest is “Your Truly, Jack the Ripper” from 1943.
“The Grinning Ghoul” (Weird Tales, June 1936) is a confessional tale, with the narrator, a psychiatrist, locked up in the asylum, relating how he got there. He had a patient who dreamed of entering tombs and seeing ghouls feasting on the dead. When the doctor decides to dissuade the man’s illusions by taking him to the gravesite, he learns otherwise. The mad race to safety at the end was pretty well done but again this story is little more than retread of Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” with the only innovation being that it is the shrink who tells the tale. Bloch does have fun mentioning eldritch tomes like “…or the grotesque Black Rites of mystic Luveh-Keraphf…”
“The Opener of the Way” (Weird Tales, October 1936) returns to Egypt and two men entering a secret pyramid. Sir Ronald Barton, Egyptologist, and his son, Peter, have located a tomb of a god who existed before the Egyptian gods. To do this they must pass a likeness of Anubis, the Opener of the Way. Sir Ronald doesn’t tell his son what ritual must be completed to get passed the hyena-headed god. Barton Sr. does all the gruesome rituals needed to get into the pyramid, including sacrificing three jackals to feed the bats. Peter is frightened by how evil his father appears to have become.
Once inside two men navigate the tunnels until they locate the secret chamber of the Anubis statue. Now Barton Sr. explains the part he withheld from his son. He must project his soul into the statue. Peter reminds him of the curse that will kill all non-believers. His father says it’s nonsense (despite the fact that he has believed every other facet of the pyramid’s magic). Sir Ronald sends his soul into the ebony figure but no door opens. The eyes of the statue appear alive, driving Peter to madness. He attacks Anubis, only to have the statue grab him and bite him with its grinning jaws. The most terrible thing is Peter recognizes the eyes as those of his father.
Bloch could have written this tale without any Mythos connections but he hints that the gods before the gods are “the Demon Messenger” referring to Nyarlathotep and mentions Prinn. He also ties it to “The Faceless God” by mentioning Doctor Stugatche .
“The Dark Demon” (Weird Tales, November 1936) is another love letter to Lovecraft. Like “Shambler”, Bloch creates a character that is obviously HPL in Edgar Henquist Gordon. The man is tall and pale, writes horror stories for small magazines and is a bit of a recluse, though he has hundreds of correspondents. Most striking is that Gordon writes all his stories from his dreams. Bloch mentions Edward Lucas White and Lovecraft himself as horror writers who used dreams. Gordon is the narrator’s mentor who helps him rise in the world of fiction writing. But the two go their own way when Gordon spends more and more time sleeping so he can worship a dark demon who will one day commune with the man. In the final chapter, the narrator comes to Gordon’s house, a pistol in his pocket, and shoots the monster lying on the man’s couch.
“Mother of Serpents” (Weird Tales, December 1936) is an odd tale in a number of ways. First it has a lengthy preamble about Haiti and Voodoo. Secondly, it is not typically Lovecraftian. The plot has the son of a voodoo witch rise to the President of the country. Upon his return from seven years in France, the man ignores and avoids his mother, a powerful witch. When he is inaugurated as president he does not invite his mother. She is there, watching from the kitchen. When he marries he does not invite her and she appear anyway. Security drags her away and she curses him. The new wife withers and dies. The president sends men to hunt for his mother, as he cracks down on voodoo throughout the island. Once he has her in his dungeon she never returns, cursing him as she dies, cursing him with the worst charm, The Curse of Snakes. The son makes a corpse fat candle from her body and arrogantly displays it in his office. The smoke from the candle becomes a snake and strangles him to death.
That last part is in Lovecraftian italics. And in this way, the story is still modeled on his old mentor. The end result feels like a story that was written by August Derleth.
“The Mannikin” (Weird Tales, April 1937) has Bloch offer us his version of the Whateley family, the Maglores. Simon Maglore is a lonely, reclusive man with a strange hump on his back. The narrator meets him at school then runs into him again in the remote hamlet of Bridgetown. The locals all despise Simon and his family, all deformed and weird.
The narrator gets it into his head that Simon is ill and wants to help him. During first encounter, he runs into Maglore unknowingly but the man rushes off. The second time it is a visit to his house. He meets Simon, but a strangely changed version that screams at him and slams the door. The next day he returns and Simon seems himself, but ends their visit when his hump, now grown very a large, seems to be moving. The narrator had heard of a similar incident with a farmer named Thatcherton.
Becoming alarmed, the narrator returns the next day with Doctor Carstairs. The plan is to commit Simon but they find him dead. Standing over his half-naked bleeding corpse is the mannikin, the animated hump that tortured the man. The two men kill the thing, burn all of Maglore’s arcane books and writings. A letter written to the friend reveals the long, terrible life of Simon Maglore. The hump was a twin, fused to his body, with its own head and hands. The evil brother slowly grew to control his host over time, forcing him to do evil research and write his terrible book. When Simon planned to reveal all this in the letter, the creature crawled farther up his back and chewed Simon’s throat.
Bloch’s big reveal is again reminiscent of Wilbur Whately and his eldritch brother. This time the twins are conjoined. Bloch’s tale has influenced other writers such as Graham Masterton and his Manitou novels. The story was adapted in 1977 in a film starring Keir Dullea. An episode of The X-Files (“Humbug”, March 31, 1995) also used this idea, though the little brother could detach and re-attach himself.
In “Fangs of Vengeance” (Weird Tales, April 1937) Bloch uses the Nathan Hinden pseudonym for the first time. He had two stories in this issue and needed a second name. He would use it again with “Death is an Elephant” (Weird Tales, February 1939). This tale takes place in a circus where a new act has arrived. Captain Zaroff and his leopards are unusual in that the animal trainer wouldn’t let anyone else feed his animals and insists on separate housing. The circus owner is desperate for fresh attractions so he gives Zaroff what he wants, even though the man is frequently cruel to his animals. The narrator is one of the circus workers who dislikes the man and suspects something is wrong. Later he meets Zaroff’s wife, Camille, who blabs some of the scandals that drove the act from the Continent. She disappears, reportedly away on a holiday. The same day, Zaroff brings a new black panther into the act.
Zaroff gets drunk and talks about his experiences with the leopard men of Africa with the narrator. The day of the show’s opening the leopards and panther walk out and refuse to perform. Zaroff whips them and they gang up and attack him. The men outside the cage shoot all the animals but Zaroff is ripped apart. All the dead animals turn into men, except the panther, which is Camille Zaroff.
Like “Mother of Serpents, a nice break from the Mythos stuff. Not really a big surprise at the end, but still a good weird tale. Bloch would write often about show business, whether live acts or later Hollywood.
“The Brood of Bubastis” (Weird Tales, March 1937) is a familiar tale. A narrator about kill himself must tell all before he goes. He went to Cornwall to see a school chum named Malcolm Kent. In their younger days,the boys had studied the occult. Kent asks his friend if he is still interested, then shows him a mine on the coast. Inside there is an Egyptian temple, Kent explains housing a renegade cult of Bubastis, fled from Egypt for unspeakable crimes. These turned out to be creating human-animal hybrids.
Kent leads his guest past carvings of obscenities to a pit in the very bottom of the cavern. Here is an altar and chambers for housing monstrosities. There are also human bones, for the Bubastis cult were cannibals. Not all the bones are old. Kent has led his friend down there to be sacrificed to his new goddess. Kent calls to her in an obscene language. This allows the narrator to punch him in the head and flee. Kent falls on the altar and the monster eats him.
The narrator runs from the cavern, back to Kent’s estate, then on to a train, then a boat and doesn’t stop until he locks himself up in his New York apartment. But it is no good. He can’t live with the terrors so he will commit suicide. For he saw the goddess, with her ten foot tall human body and her cat head.
Familiar Cthulhu Mythos stuff, mentioning Prinn’s chapter, Saracenic Rituals. I wonder if Bloch was tiring of the mold? His choice of Cornwall instead of America must have been precipitated on the idea that the Egyptians couldn’t have fled too far from Africa. (In 1970, Thor Heyerdahl proved Egyptian reed boats could reach North America in the Ra II.) In “The Eyrie” several months later, an English fan tore the story apart on the basis of Mr. Bloch’s inaccurate version of Cornwall and its legends. His use of another Egyptian god would be repeated again with “The Secret of Sebek”.
“The Black Kiss” (Weird Tales, June 1937) with Henry Kuttner, has a painter named Graham Dean inherit an old house on the California coast. He experiences underwater dreams that force him to see a doctor. He receives a telegram from his uncle, Michael Leigh, a famous occultist, to leave the house and go see a Doctor Yamada. Dean falls asleep and experiences the “black kiss”, a seal-shaped monster kisses him, filling him with evil.
Doctor Yamada shows up on his doorstep, waking him from his dream. He explains that the black kiss of Dean’s ancient grandmother, Morella Godolfo, will transfer her spirit into his body. He asks Graham if he has been kissed and the man lies, saying no. He takes Graham to his house but it is too late. The painter runs off into the sea. He finds himself in a group of the weird, white, seal-like creatures from his dream. He follows them through the ocean, to grab victims from a sunken zeppelin disaster.
Later in a cave he sees that his own body is that of one of the sea monsters. He also sees that his own body is sneaking out of the cave. Graham attacks Morella, now in his body, and knows that the two men entering the cave, Doctor Yamada and his uncle, will shoot him down. Before they do this, he tears out his own body’s throat, dying happily knowing he has destroyed the ancient terror known as Morella Godolfo.
I was pleasantly disappointed by this story. I was sure it was going to be another Deep One pastiche in the August Derleth style. Instead, it was a very cool horror tale, Lovecraftian but not Mythos. Bloch wrote this story with Henry Kuttner, their first of four joint stories. The choice of California as a setting is not hard to figure out, as Henry Kuttner lived there. Other writers like Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett were part of Kuttner’s California group. Bloch would move to Hollywood in 1960 as he transitioned from magazine and book writing to screenplays.
Bloch would collaborate occasionally with other writers including Jim Kjelgaard and Ralph Milne Farley, who he knew from his early days with the Milwaukee Fictioneers, also Wilson Tucker, Fritz Leiber, and Andre Norton in 1990 for The Jekyll Legacy, and even posthumously with Edgar Allan Poe!
“The Creeper in the Crypt” (Weird Tales, July 1937) shows Bloch playing with how to tell a Mythos tale. The plot has a well-to-do man from Arkham being kidnapped by Joe Regetti and his gang. They are holed up in the basement of an abandoned house. The Polish henchman explains that another gang had set up in the abandoned Chambers House. Tony Fellippo had been found killed in the basement with only his leg left behind. He also explains that houses in Arkham with an iron door in the basement are connected to a series of tunnels that run to the cemetery, used in old days by witches. (Bloch has some fun here, having Joe accuse him of reading “too many bum magazines”.) Regetti is warned but he sends his men out to deliver the ransom note.
The narrator is tied up and placed in another room, among the broken jars of preserves. He can hear what is happening but can not see it. He hears Regetti snoring, then the clanking of the iron door, something dragging itself across the floor and giggling morbidly. Joe screams out then munching and crunching follows, to finished with marrow sucking.
The kidnapped man frees himself with some broken glass then flees the house. He goes to the cops then to the Government Men, before moving far from Arkham. Bloch ends with the usual Lovecraftian italics reveal: Joe Regetti was chewed to death. This reveal feels unnecessary and obvious.
What makes this tale more fun is the thugs, who though cliches of ethnic types of Italians and the Polish that Lovecraft worried so much about, are more interesting than the usual Lovecraft type character. Added to this is the sensory block the author uses so that you can only hear the action. Bloch is trying to stretch at the same time he tells the same story again. He would write actual crime fiction later in his career for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.
“The Secret of Sebek” (Weird Tales, November 1937) takes us to New Orleans during Mardi Gras. The narrator is a caricature of Bloch himself, a man who writes “a series of Egyptian stories for a magazine”. He feels lonely so he gets drunk and stumbles into a man who recognizes him. The man is wealthy Henricus Vanning. Vanning invites him to a party. The mansion is lit in a reddish hell light and filled with costumers disguised as vampires, werewolves, gods and goddesses. The narrator sees a man with the head of a crocodile, just like the Egyptian god Sebek.
Vanning explains the fools that party in the main room are a cover for serious occult activities. A group of four who call themselves “The Coffin Club”, they include Vanning, Doctor Delvin, a foremost ethnologist, De Marigny, famous occultist — Vanning mentions “the Randolph Carter case”, vanning assistant, Professor Royce and Professor Weildan, the famous Egyptologist. The men want the narrator to help them decide something. Weildan has brought a mummy into the country, one of only four ever found of a priest of Sebek. They show him the cursed diadem that rested with the priest. Weildan wants to destroy the mummy; Vanning does not.
It is now that the narrator tells his host about the crocodile-headed man that he saw. The men freak out. and right they should because the crocodile man appears and rips out Vanning’s throat. The narrator tries to stop him, touches the thing’s neck. He runs and never goes back to New Orleans. Big reveal: when he touched the thing’s neck he could see that it was not a costume, but real.
More of the same with plenty of Mythos tie ins: Prinn, Bubastis, Cornwall. De Marigny originally appeared in the H. P. Lovecraft-E. Hoffman Price collaboration, “Through the Gate of the Silver Key” (Weird Tales, July 1934). Brian Lumley would borrow him for a main character in some novels in the 1970s. Bloch also brings the name “Henricus” back in from “The Feast in the Abbey”.
“Fane of the Black Pharaoh” (Weird Tales, December 1937) is a shorter piece. Captain Carteret has a mysterious man come to his door in Cairo. The stranger bears the seal of Nephren-Ka, the legendary Black Pharaoh. Nephren-Ka had ruled Egypt with a black cult that worshiped Nyarlathotep. His enemies drove him out, burying him in a secret tomb. The mysterious stranger admits he is a priest of the Black Pharaoh, and that before the pharaoh died he had been given the gift of prophecy and had drawn the history of Egypt on the walls of the tomb. The walls predict that Carteret will come to the tomb.
Against his better judgment the man goes with his guide, seeing the secret tomb, with its giant ape statues, its treasures and secrets. Cartetet tries not to look at the walls but can’t resist. He follows the flow of time, seeing the Crusaders, the Ottomans, Napoleon, even Ludwig Prinn’s visit. Finally he sees his own visit and the future — a priest stabbing him to death. Admittedly a lot of work for a predictable ending.
Once in Egypt things seem a little less clear. Weildan has a secret informant that he argues with. The Professor claims he shot a warning shot over the man’s head but the narrator sees the blood on his hands. Despite this alarming incident he goes for a picnic in the desert. It turns out to be at the location of the tomb. Professor Weildan’s action seem almost crazed but since they are there…
Entering the tomb, which is quite simple, they find the mummy of the priest. The images on the outside of the body tell the story of how the man was buried alive, with organs in tact, after having his eyes plucked from his head and replaced by jewels. These jewels become the object of their treasure hunting.
Once the mummy is unwrapped, the narrator stares at the glowing yellow gems. He can’t look away… until he finds himself inside the mummy’s body! Only plucking the stones from his new mummy body returns him to his own body. He wakes to find Weildan dead of shock. He takes the gems and flees. He begins to write up the story, but can’t resist staring at the gems. The transfer happens again, so that the mummy is typing up the story. (This is what Virgil Finlay chose to illustrate.) The soul of the evil priest is now free in the world in his body. His body mummy crumbles away as the story finishes. This could have been Bloch’s final Egyptian story but he would write “Beetles” for the December 1938 issue.
“Slave of the Flames” (Weird Tales, June 1938) is another experiment, and an important one. The tale follows an insane firebug who lights the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Bloch would write several novels about insane men, most famous of course, is Psycho (1959) but also his first The Scarf (1947) and most importantly here, Firebug (1961).
A pyromaniac named Abe starts a fire in Chicago. He watches the flames, thinking of them as living monsters. Once the flames are out he gets the feeling that someone is watching him and runs. The man turns out not to be a cop but a fellow devotee named Zarog. He takes him to a house where a grotesquely old and fat man claims to be Emperor Nero and explains Abe is the reincarnation of Apius, his faithful slave. Nero explains he and Zarog have survived from ancient times and can only be destroyed by the flames of Melek Taos, their god for whom they burn cities, such as London in 1666. Abe is given a phenix ring and pledges himself to Nero and his promises of fires and wealth and power.
The next day, Abe and Zarog light the Great Chicago Fire, then run about the streets enjoying the sights. Bloch lovingly describes all the actual terrors of the day including riots and pyromaniacs lighting more fires. Later the three men go to the cemetery to watch the fire burn. Returning home, Nero and Zarog begin to age quickly. The sacrificial fire has been lit and now the two men will receive new life from Melek Taos. When the god appears they are robbed of their lives by Abe, who claims the fire just for himself. Melek Taos crushes and devours the men, then turns to Abe who tries to play Nero’s stringed instrument but dies anyway.
Bloch ends the tale with a few sentences on the strange things found after the fire, including a genuine Roman lyre. What begins like a crime story of insanity becomes a genuinely supernatural tale at the end. The entire story is such a pleasure since Bloch works in all the history of the fire (and other fires) seamlessly. Even the Lovecraftian reveal (sans italics now) seems fitting.
With “Return to the Sabbath” (Weird Tales, July 1938) we finally arrive at the new Robert Bloch. Bloch is now serving horror with a nice dollop of black humor. This is the man we know and love. The man who wrote: “Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.” (Stephen King seems to be using this one since Bob passed.)
The plot concerns Hollywood studio PR men. (Bloch would write many times about Hollywood but this was the first.) While dozing in a cheap theater, the narrator and his companion see a foreign film “Return to the Sabbath” starring an amazingly creepy actor. He is Karl Jorla. They bring Karl to America to be the next Bela Lugosi. He is tall and pale with dead eyes even in person. He admits the film was shown by accident. It had been made by real Satanists and the ceremony shown was real. Jorla only took the job because he had to get out of Europe. The people he made the film for wanted revenge for the film’s release.
Later the director of the film is murdered in Paris, an inverted crucifix carved into his chest. Jorla becomes alarmed and lives a life of secrecy, trying to hide from assassins. Several foreigners are arrested on the Studio lot, one bearing an automatic. Jorla hides himself away in the Hollywood Hills. The first day of filming draws near.
And no Jorla. The director begins filming without him. The heroine is shooting reaction shots with Baron Ulmo’s coffin when the lid rises, and Jorla is there playing the Baron. A red inverted crucifix shines on his chest. He rises, whispers something and then lies down again. When the crew check the coffin, Jorla is not there. Not surprising, everybody freaks out. Kincaid and the narrator have the films processed and they watch what was captured there. No Jorla, only the crucifix. The men listen to the soundtrack and hear that the words Jorla said are an address in the hills. Police go to that address and find Karl Jorla, murdered, three days ago.
“Secret of the Observatory” was Bloch’s breakaway story. Written for Ray A. Palmer and Amazing Stories, August 1938. While he had been experimenting within the Weird Tales formula, it is here that he truly writes something new, perhaps even sans Lovecraft. Unfortunately result is disappointing. “Secret of the Observatory” is a hack piece of Palmer fiction in the “Yellow Peril” tradition. A brave American scientist/newspaperman discovers a Japanese scientist working on secret weapons in Canada. There is a love interest, long explanations of the science behind the “Argus Camera” (added by RAP no doubt) and the whole thing is predictable and dull. Bloch freed himself of Lovecraft but is starting at the bottom again in reinventing himself. He wasn’t the only SF writer to produce this kind of racist twaddle. Henry Kuttner wrote “The Bloodless Peril” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1937). Science Fiction’s greatest early hero, Buck Rogers in Philip Frances Nowlan’s “Armageddon 2419” and “The War Lords of Han” began with a yellow peril plot in Amazing Stories in 1928-9. Let’s remember this is before 1941 when the Pulps would be filled with patriotic wartime stories portraying America’s enemies as sub-human monsters. It is sad to see Robert Bloch go down this same path.
On the positive side, this first story for Ray Palmer led to more stories, including the Lefty Feep series beginning in Fantastic Adventures, April 1942 with “Time Wounds All Heels”. 1939 would see Bloch writing horror stories for other Pulps than Weird Tales, with many in Strange Tales and his first story for John W. Campbell’s Unknown, “The Cloak”. Bloch had, if not left the Weird Tales behind, added more strings to his instrument.
“The Mandarin’s Canaries” (Weird Tales, September 1938) features a terrible Chinese emperor, Quong. The man enjoys having arrows shot into criminals in his garden and watching them die. He rings bells to summon a flock of golden canaries brought by Portuguese sailors, which strip the body bare. After this demonstration, Bloch backs up and gives us the long, horrible history of Quong, from a child to when he kills his brothers and fathers to take the throne. Quong makes the mistake of seducing and killing the wife, Yu Li, of his archer, Hin-Tze. The archer fills Quong full of arrows but the emperor stabs him with a quarrel. The two men suffer the killer birds, but Quong lives long enough to see two birds emerge from Hin-Tze’s skeleton, the spirits of the loving couple. Bloch mentions the torture of the Copper Bowl, referring to the famous torture tale “The Copper Bowl” (Weird Tales, December 1928) by George Fielding Eliot.
“The Hound of Pedro” (Weird Tales, November 1938) is a gruesome masterwork from a writer who would write several. Black Pedro and his buccaneers come to Novorros in April of 1717 and kill the white priests. The local Yaqui Indians are enslaved and forced to mine the local gold. Pedro is cruel but his companions are worse. The Moor priest, Abouri, demands virgins for sacrifice once a month. Worst of all is the Hound of Pedro, a big, black beast that kills miners and children alike. When ten local men complain about the sacrifices, they are taken to the desert and buried up to their necks. Pedro and his men bring large balls out and kill them with a game of bowls.
Word finally gets out about Novorros and the atrocities going on there. Spaniard, Don Miguel, brings a small force to free the town. They find Pedro, Abouri and the hound in the underground chamber where the three send souls to Satan. Pedro and his hound lie on slabs, where the wizard’s magic trades their souls. Abouri and Pedro are killed with swords but the hound escapes. The Yaquis capture it and bury it in the sand like the young men. They plan to kill it by rolling balls over it. Miguel interferes and stabs the creature in the head. He hears a voice coming from the dying hound. It is Black Pedro praying for forgiveness.
I have to mention Joseph Doolin’s illustration for this story. Doolin was one of the very best illustrator’s Weird Tales used (along with Virgil Finlay and Harold de Lay). Joe’s illo is one of the very worst ever done. The story is filled with violence and black magic. No shortage of material for a great illustration. What he provided is “Beagle with Candles”, something from a love Pulp. I have to assume Doolin either wasn’t given the story to read or enough time to draw a good picture. Blah!
“Beetles” (Weird Tales, December 1938) is one of those typical Horror tales, used often by August Derleth and the Victorian writers before him, where an old friend of a doomed character narrates a few evil encounters. Arthur Hartley is a splendid fellow before his trip to Egypt, but the Egyptologist becomes moody and sickly on his return. The narrator, using his old school friendship, talks to Hartley until he reveals that he is cursed because he stole a mummy. The curse of Scarabaeus falls on him, with beetles following him all the way back to America. He can’t sleep because he knows the beetles will crawl onto his face while he slumbers. The narrator seeks the help of a shrink but the two men return to Hartley’s to find the mummy, its body eaten away by beetles. They also find Hartley who is dead. When the narrator touches the body it is light. The mouth opens a horde of beetles pour out.
Sam Moskwitz says of the early Bloch stories: “Their popularity became undeniable, but equally undeniable was the fact that the endings were forced and unbelievable. Stories like The Druidic Doom, The Faceless God, The Grinning Ghoul, The Opener of the Way, The Dark Demon, and Brood of Bubastis were cast in the same mold. The author seemed unaware that in the majority of his later writings Lovecraft had abandoned the supernatural in explaining his horrors and had leaned with increasing weight on science. Bloch was actually writing pastiches of early Lovecraft…”
But Bloch was moving toward Science Fiction too. His friendship with The Milwaukee Group of writers, included Ralph Milne Farley, Ray Palmer and especially Stanley G. Weinbaum, All of them pulled Bloch away from Weird Tales and horror. With “Secret of the Observatory” we see Robert Bloch finally opening himself up to new types of writing. Fantasy and Science Fiction would become half of Bloch’s production with more appearances in Unknown, Galaxy, Worlds of If and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
There would be more Lovecraftian type stories, even more Cthulhu Mythos pastiche but the ice was finally breaking and eventually Bloch would pen the classics for which he is remembered best, stories like “Your Truly, Jack the Ripper” (Weird Tales, July 1943) and “That Hellbound Train” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1958). He would move into psychological horror in stories like “Enoch” (Weird Tales, September 1946) and into his own brand of humorous horror in stories like “Sweets to the Sweet” (Weird Tales, March 1947). The Milwaukee Fictioneers would become important to him, before he moved to Hollywood were he worked with the likes of Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and William F. Nolan.
Robert M. Price wrote in the introduction to The Mysteries of the Worm (1981): “Though Robert Bloch wrote several entertaining tales in the Cthulhu Mythos, it is not for them that he is most widely known. Of course, he is most famous for the masterpiece Psycho. And in that novel there is one scene with special significance to Mythos buffs. When, near the end of the book, Lila Crane is furtively exploring the eerie old Bates house and stumbles onto Norman’s cache of old books, every Lovecraftian reader ought to experience a sense of déjà vu, especially since one of the titles is a favorite of Lovecraft’s, mentioned by him in precisely such contexts.”
Here’s the paragraph Price is referring to:
“Here Lila found herself pausing, puzzling, then peering in perplexity at the incongruous contents of Norman Bates’s library. A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Dimension and Being. These were not the books of a small boy, and they were equally out of place in the home of a rural motel proprietor. She scanned the shelves rapidly. Abnormal psychology, occultism, theosophy. Translations of Là Bas, Justine. And here, on the bottom shelf, a nondescript assortment of untitled volumes, poorly bound. Lila pulled one out at random and opened it. The illustration that leaped out at her was almost pathologically pornographic.” (Psycho by Robert Bloch)
Robert Bloch left Lovecraft behind back in the 1930s but took an immeasurable toolbox of story-writing skills from those days that would sustain him for decades.
Next time…1939
