"The Hungry House" (1951)

This Robert Bloch story takes on the haunted house template and somehow beefs it up into something new. A young couple rents a nice but long abandoned house in the country. It doesn't take long before pandemonium starts edging in by degree. It's interesting to see a more conventional ghost story showing up in The Weird, as the anthology's editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have noted elsewhere they are not much into them. Bloch achieves an extraordinary tension here as events quickly transpire. He's usually good at story structure, and always good at keeping things moving, though he is also too often prone to a jocular tone and rimshot puns, which can dispel tension. But that's pretty much under control here, and his innovation of locating the malevolent spirit in mirrors and reflective surfaces is a good one. It's not so much the mirrors that set this apart as it is Bloch for once not getting in his own way. The story gets hooks in early and they only dig in deeper. The shadows and omens work in quiet but penetrating ways. Things seem to be there in the reflections but it might just be the light or the angle. There's a good moment when the husband finds a locked room in the attic full of mirrors, stuffed away presumably by a former resident. At a stroke it changes the whole story, accelerates the coagulating menace. You feel the clamp coming down. Bloch really wants to hit this reveal hard so the language becomes a bit overheated: "A thousand silver slivers stabbed at his eyeballs," etc. It takes too many sentences to find out these are mirrors. The scary part is that they are there, not that they glitter. But if some of these mirror passages are weak others are quite good, subtle and compelling, especially in the first experiences of the house. I suspect Bloch worked largely by instinct because when he hits it he really hits it. And he is hitting it here. He seems to be naturally inhabiting the material of this story, and it works. His depiction of the experience of this couple is great, and then, when we finally get to the legend behind all of it, that's great too. And Bloch is right to make us wait, because at the moment he's simply good at everything he's doing.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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