Robert Bloch appeared in Unknown/Unknown Worlds only three times. Despite this, it was an important transition for him. Bloch’s primary market was Weird Tales. He published there exclusively until August 1938 when he wrote “Secret of the Observatory” for Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories. In 1939, Bob was looking to expand his list of purchasing editors so after Palmer, the next one he acquired was the very picky John W. Campbell. Campbell published Astounding Science-Fiction and a new Fantasy magazine, Unknown. The stories that appeared in this Pulp were not rigorous SF but a kind of blend between Fantasy and SF. The policy was:
…it was the first, if not the only, fantasy magazine whose direct ancestor was a science fiction magazine. That unique parentage, blending the subject matter of traditional fantasy and the rational attitudes of modern science fiction, gave Unknown a most distinctive, highly individual flavor.
True, some of the characters roaming its pages were gods or genies, werewolves or witches, demons or dryads. But the world in which they did their things, more often than not, was not some fairytale kingdom in a hazy time that never was, but the everyday world the magazine’s twentieth-century readers lived in, with all the logical and illogical constraints, trials, and tribulations that come with that territory. Only in Unknown would you find gnomes being unionized, or the ultimate showdown between Good and Evil happening in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Stanley Schmidt and Martin H. Greenberg, Unknown Worlds: Tales From Beyond, 1988)
Bloch embraced this new attitude right from the beginning. He had spent his youth writing jokes and comedic skits so humor was not foreign to him, though his Weird Tales work up to this point had been Lovecraftian and most serious. It is here in Unknown that Bloch begins crafting that dark humor he will be famous for. The opening lines of “The Cloak” (Unknown, May 1939) poke fun at his old work:
The sun was dying, and its blood spattered the sky as it crept into a sepulcher behind the hills. The keening wind sent the dry, fallen leaves scurrying toward the west, as though hastening them to the funeral of the sun.
“Nuts!” said Henderson to himself and stopped thinking.
Through out the beginning of the tale, as Henderson finds the old costume shop and buys the cloak, his mind will slip into these hyperbolic horror descriptions only to have the thoughts dispelled with a loud “Nuts!” That opener is right out of a Weird Tales story, perhaps even one written by Bloch himself. It is like John W. Campbell’s philosophy acted out right there in the story. It also does two other things: it allows the reader to know something supernatural is going to happen (though in less over-stated terms) and that the story is going to be funny.
The plot has Stephen Henderson buy his cloak from a strange looking man in a gloomy shop. The owner pops up out of a trap door from the basement. He sells the cloak (not rent it) for $5.00, claiming it is a genuine vampire cloak. (Later Henderson will read a late edition of the newspaper that tells him that the costume shop burned down and in its basement were found three coffins.)
Wearing his new cloak, feeling cold whenever he puts it on, he goes to a costume party. Passing a mirror he sees that he has no reflection. He meets an angel (both figuratively and literally as she is wearing an angel costume) in Sheila Darrly. The two get on when Henderson’s boss, Lindstrom, drunk and abusive tries to make fun of “Dracula Henderson”. Stephen comes close to actually biting the man on the neck, but Sheila pulls him back. Henderson makes a joke and the audience laughs it off. Only Lindstrom realizes how close he came to having his blood sucked out.
Stephen and Sheila go to the roof, leaving the party behind. Henderson is so in love he tells her all about the cloak and how he feels like he is becoming a vampire. This pleases Sheila, who reveals she too is vampire. The story ends with Sheila’s fangs sinking into Henderson’s neck. The two new lovers will be together forever in dark eternity.
“A Good Knight’s Work” (Unknown Worlds, October 1941) has Bloch going all out for comedy. Telling the story in the first person, the narrator uses exaggeration and similes galore:
This morning I wake up at four a. m. because fifty thousand sparrows are holding a Communist rally under the window. I knock my shins over a wheelbarrow in the back yard because the plumbing is remote. When I get dressed I have to play tag with fifty chickens I am taking to market, and by the time that’s over I am covered with more feathers than a senator who gets adopted by Indians in a newsreel…
The entire story reads like this so it is heavy slogging to pull the plot from the humor. (Some of the out-of-date references ruin the jokes but make intriguing history lessons.) The basic idea is a farmer (who is a cynical drunk) returns from market and runs into a Medieval knight in the road. Sir Pallagyn of the Black Keep was sent by Merlin from the past. Blocking the narrator’s way, the farmer hits him with a spanner. The young knight, who, of course, speaks with plenty of “Prithee” and “Yoicks!”, devotes himself to the “wizard” who has defeated him in battle.
The farmer is on his way to a roadhouse to pay his ten dollars protection to a retired gangster named Thin Tommy Malloon. He refuses the graft and Tommy and two roughs set on him. Pallagyn to the rescue and “protection” will never be paid again. Having been saved by the knight, the farmer feels he owes the man. He offers to help him with his quest. This turns out to be acquiring the Cappodocian Tabouret, an ancient table for the Holy Grail to sit upon. With a few phone calls, the farmer locates the old stool at the museum in the city. They put Pallagyn’s horse in the barn then head off.
The plan is for the farmer to donate a suit of armor to the museum. It will not be empty, of course. This plan falls apart when the farmer runs into a rich man and the knight gets drunk. Eventually they end up in the museum room with the Tabouret, surrounded by an army of cops. Pallagyn gets the old table and disappears. The last item is the farmer realizing he still has Pallagyn’s horse in his stable. “Do you know anybody who wants to buy a horse, cheap?”
I imagine Bloch got the idea by simply reversing Mark Twain’s A Conneticut Yank in King Arthur’s Court. The story has many opportunities for humor and Bloch uses these well. Despite this, I personally am not a fan of this kind of fantasy. It feels contrived and the humor is usually of a pretty low type. Bloch did it better than “King Arthur’s Knight in a Yankee Court” (Amazing Stories, April 1941) by A. W. Bernal.
“The Shoes” (Unknown Worlds, February 1942) is a short end piece, returning to situational comedy. The tale starts with the old chestnut of a man selling his soul to the devil. The customer wants to be immortal but asks for it in an unusual way: “I want never to be killed.” The Devil bargains, claiming certain things are even beyond his ability to provide. Ultimately, the man is given immortality if he is wearing his pair of patent-leather shoes. The man seals the deal in blood, then unwisely taunts the devil.
He experiments with a razor, cutting his own throat. He reappears, along with his shoes, fifteen feet away. The dead body is lying on the bathroom floor. He takes the corpse to a hotel in a trunk and sets it up to look like a suicide.
He grows bolder. He goads his boss into killing him, then steals a quarter million in bonds while the old man is burning his body in the furnace in the basement. He escapes on the train, headed for New York and greater things, wealth, even power. A shoe shine boy works on his shoes.
The shoe owner overhears the house dick from the hotel talking on the train. He has spotted the man who was supposed to be dead, and plans to give up a bit of his vacation to question him. The shoe owner comes up with another plan, again grabbing his razor. The shoe shine boy finds him dead, having mixed up his shoes with another customer’s.
Having found success with Unknown Worlds (a magazine that would be cancelled because of war-time paper shortages) Bloch used his new comedic style on a long-running series for Ray A. Palmer, the Lefty Feep stories beginning with “Time Wounds All Heels” in Fantastic Adventures, April 1942. There would be seventeen of them up to 1945. (They deserve their own piece, of course, but Bloch dials back a bit on the jokes.) The Weird Tales stories remained largely serious but slowly even these became more humorous with “A Sorcerer Runs For Sheriff” and “The Eager Dragon”. The darkly funny Robert Bloch had found his footing, playing emcee at many Science Fiction conventions, he would be thought of that way until 1959 and the release of Psycho.
