Happy Birthday Robert Bloch!

Happy Birthday Robert Bloch!

 

"Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk"

Robert Bloch is well known to HPL fans even if they have never consciously been aware of the fact. As the youngest member of H.P. Lovecraft’s circle of correspondents, HPL wrote him into one of his best-known stories under the transparent pseudonym “Robert Blake”. He appears thus in the troubled and oft-cited work “The Haunter of the Dark”; this was in response to Bloch’s story “The Shambler from the Stars” which features a thinly disguised HPL as the protagonist. As such, Bloch is the only person to whom HPL ever dedicated one of his works.

Bloch was born in Chicago on the 5^th of April 1917 to German Jewish middle-class parents. The family moved to Milwaukee in 1929 and Bloch grew up there reading Weird Tales magazine, from which reading he developed his interest in writing and particularly for the weird fiction mode. He wrote for his school newspaper and performed in school vaudeville revues.

Graduating in 1932, he wrote to HPL who wrote back encouraging Bloch to write seriously, with the intention of publishing. His first commercial sales, at age 17, were to Weird Tales and comprised his Lovecraft pastiches “The Feast in the Abbey” and “The Secret in the Tomb”. Soon he was corresponding also with Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth and writing the bulk of his best-known Mythos pieces. During this period of work he created the dread tomes De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes de Goules and generally extended the Cthulhu Mythos.

Bloch felt Lovecraft’s death deeply and his writing after this period moves from various supernatural subjects looking for new angles and inspiration. After a visit to Henry Kuttner in California 1937, he wrote his first science fiction piece, “The Secret of the Observatory”.

However, his metier came inevitably to be tales concerning serial killers and their particular mindsets. A regular theme in his writing were the facts concerning Jack the Ripper: many of his stories revolve around the Ripper being able to travel through time, thus avoiding capture, or of the Ripper psyche reincarnating throughout history moving from the Marquis de Sade to the Ripper and onwards. Eventually, even these fantastic characters and their motives became reduced further to the workaday horror of serial killers in real-life communities. Bloch read of and wrote about the multiple-murderer Ed Gein and used his findings in “The Real Bad Friend” and “Lucy Comes to Stay”; from here, it was a very short step to Norman Bates and Psycho.

Bloch’s reputation was made when Alfred Hitchcock picked up Psycho to make into a movie. Although he had nothing to do with the film’s creative process (the screenplay was written by Joe Stefano) Bloch gained instant acclaim as the author of the concept and it is the thing for which he is known most widely. The rights were bought for $9,500 from which Bloch received $6,750 before tax. He gained no further compensation from the project and, as a character, he was written out of the recent movie “Hitchcock” (2012) which details the making of the movie; none of “Psycho’s” sequels were based on Bloch’s material and he gained nothing from them except further notoriety by association.

Robert Bloch spent many years at work in Hollywood, penning episodes for many television series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He also wrote three episodes for: “Star Trek - the Original Series”: “Cat’s-paw”, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and another entitled “Wolf in the Fold” which evokes some of his fascination for the Jack the Ripper material.

Bloch remains one of the most prolific American horror, science fiction and fantasy authors of the modern era, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1975 at the First World Fantasy Convention held in Providence, Rhode Island. Appropriately, the award was in the form of a bust of HPL.

Bibliography

Novels & Novellas

In the Land of Sky-Blue Ointment with Harold Gauer (unpublished, c. 1938)

Nobody Else Laughed with Harold Gauer (unpublished, 1939)

The Scarf, (1947; revised 1966)

Spiderweb (1954)

The Kidnapper (1954)

The Will to Kill (1954)

Shooting Star (1958)

This Crowded Earth (1958)

Psycho (1959)

The Dead Beat (1960)

Firebug (1961)

The Couch (1962)

Terror (1962)

Ladies Day (includes This Crowded Earth) (1968)

The Star Stalker (1968)

The Todd Dossier (1969; published under the author name Collier Young)

Sneak Preview (1971)

It's All in Your Mind (1971)

Night World (1972)

American Gothic (1974)

Strange Eons (1978)

There Is a Serpent in Eden (1979)

Psycho II (1982)

Twilight Zone: The Movie. (1983). Novelisation of the Warner Bros movie, based on stories by John Landis, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Josh Rogan, and Jerome Bixby.

Night of the Ripper (1984)

Unholy Trinity (1986); an omnibus reprint of The Scarf, The Couch and The Dead Beat

Lori (1989)

Screams: Three Novels of Suspense (1989) an omnibus reprint of The Will to Kill, Firebug and The Star Stalker

Psycho House (1990)

The Jekyll Legacy with Andre Norton (1991)

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1991)

The Thing (1993)

Psycho - The 35th Anniversary Edition (1994)

Short Story Collections

The Thing (1932)

The Opener of the Way (1945)

Sea Kissed (1945)

Terror in the Night (1958)

Pleasant Dreams: Nightmares (1960)

House of the Hatchet (1960)

Blood Runs Cold (1961)

Nightmares (1961)

More Nightmares (1961)

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1962)

Atoms and Evil (1962)

Horror 7 (1963)

Bogey Men (1963)

The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (1965)

Tales in a Jugular Vein (1965)

Chamber of Horrors (1966)

The Living Demons (1967)

Dragons and Nightmares: Four Short Novels (1968)

Bloch and Bradbury: Whispers from Beyond (1969)

Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow (1971)

The King of Terrors: Tales of Madness and Death (1977)

The Best of Robert Bloch (1977)

Cold Chills (1977)

Out of the Mouths of Graves (1978)

The Laughter of a Ghoul/What Every Young Ghoul Should Know (1978)

Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of (1979)

Mysteries of the Worm (1981)

Midnight Pleasures (1987)

Lost in Space and Time With Lefty Feep (1987)

Selected Stories of Robert Bloch (3 vols: Final Reckonings, Bitter Ends & Last Rites) (1987)

Fear and Trembling (1989)

Mysteries of the Worm (revised ed., 1993)

The Early Fears (1994)

Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998)

The Lost Bloch: Volume 1: The Devil With You! (1999)

The Lost Bloch: Volume 2: Hell on Earth (2000)

The Lost Bloch: Volume 3: Crimes and Punishments (2002)

The Reader's Bloch: Volume 1: The Fear Planet and Other Unusual Destinations (2005)

The Reader's Bloch: Volume 2: Skeleton in the Closet and Other Stories (2009)

Poetry

A Portfolio Of Some Rare And Exquisite Poetry By The Bard Of Bards by “Sarcophagus W. Dribble” (1937 or 1938)

Non-Fiction

The Eighth Stage of Fandom (1962)

Out of My Head (1986); essays

Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography (1993)

Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master (1995); a tribute omnibus