#AtoZ Challenge - B Is For Robert Bloch

This year, my A to Z Challenge theme is SF and fantasy writers and their worlds. Today’s author is American horror writer Robert Bloch. Think you’ve never heard of his work? I bet you have! Read on...

Robert Bloch - from Wikipedia

Robert Bloch, American author of horror, mystery and fantasy, is one I discovered in my teens. I actually met him once, when he was guest of honour at Cinecon, a small convention in Melbourne many years ago. He was very pleasant and laid back, someone you could chat with in between panels. One night of the con, he was chatting with a group of us and when he got up to go, he turned and pointed at the quietest member of the group. “You talk too much!” he said with a straight face before walking out of the door.

I first encountered his work on the beach, where my friend Denise and I went in the summer, during our teens. Denise’s family owned a boarding house and their boarders tended to leave their books and magazines behind when they left. (That’s also how I discovered Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land). Denise brought them with her to the beach, and one of them happened to have a Bloch short story in it, about an old silent movie extra who has started seeing his departed girlfriend in movies where she never appeared, waving at him. Denise read that one aloud. Soon after, I read a story in which a girl who likes late night horror movies goes travelling and finds monsters from those movies wherever she goes. The last line was a delicious twist. I was hooked. 

Public Domain

Robert Bloch was born in Chicago in 1917. He was a huge fan of the horror magazine Weird Tales, which he used to save for every month as it was more expensive than the other pulp magazines. He made his first professional sale to that magazine when he was only seventeen, and after that, the rest was history.   

This was the golden age of SF and fantasy.  A lot of rubbish was published in the pulp magazines, but it also started the careers of some classic authors. As a teenager, he wrote a fan letter to horror writer H.P Lovecraft, who later became a friend. They wrote each other into their stories. He also became friends with some of the other big names of the era. 

You think you haven’t heard of him? I bet you’ve heard of Psycho, though. The Hitchcock movie was based on his book of the same name. Have you ever seen the original Star Trek series? He wrote three episodes of that. One was “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, a very early episode of the series. “Catspaw” had Halloween characters and the Three Witches. “Wolf In The Fold” was based on his short story “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper”. He did a lot of Jack the Ripper material, including one I read in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology, “A Toy For Juliette”. I’ll let you discover this one for yourself rather than give you spoilers. But it’s a doozy! And while there has been a huge amount of Jack the Ripper material in fantasy and horror since then, his story “Yours Truly...”, published in 1943, might be where it all started. 

I admit I have only read his short fiction, but that is amazing stuff. In short fiction you can say everything in very few words and have clever twists. And some of his twists were very clever. I’d describe his short work as fun rather than scary, something I understood better after meeting that very funny man at Cinecon. 

You can still get his work quite easily in ebook and Dangerous Visions was still in print as of a few years ago, when I bought a copy. It’s a classic in its own right, so worth checking out.