“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943)

[spoilers] This Robert Bloch story, according to editor David G. Hartwell of the Dark Descent anthology, is arguably his best, which is a pretty big statement about someone who was so insanely prolific and also author of the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. I’m not arguing against it (I still need to read Psycho!), but only, as an ongoing Bloch skeptic (too much hackwork and not enough better than meh, he started early and lived long), raising an eyebrow to hear the argument. In fairness, it might be the best thing I’ve read by him, but “The Hungry House” from The Weird (edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) at least rivals it. Bloch’s primary flaw is a broad vaudevillian tendency to crack glib and jokey, all puns and dad jokes welcome. That’s less of a problem here (though it persists) and my interest in the Jack the Ripper story gets me the rest of the way over the hump. I’m fascinated by the case and up for regular reviews of the details, which takes up a portion of this story. Bloch’s semi-vampiric premise is that Jack the Ripper is immortal, committing blood sacrifice to extend his life. He disappeared as Jack the Ripper, media celebrity, but continued to kill. An investigator, an Englishman, has been on the case for years when he approaches the first-person narrator, a Chicago psychiatrist, to enlist his aid, which involves attending a bizarre trendy bohemian loft type of party along with handfuls of Chicago references. The story’s twist is brazenly gimmicky but Bloch gets away with it somehow and the story is considered by many to be a stone classic. It’s fairly a surprise that the narrator, the Chicago psychiatrist, turns out to be himself Jack the Ripper. But you really can’t think about this too much or it all falls apart. The investigator’s interest in the psychiatrist is never really given. Chicago, not to mention the world, is a big place for such happenstance. And why, as the narrator, is he withholding from the reader who he is, other than for a short story effect? In the end this story doesn’t work so well for me. Bloch is interesting because he straddles two major strains of 20th-century horror, starting out as a teenage disciple of H.P. Lovecraft, and evolving into the straightforward dialogue-driven story with a surprise (and/or ironic) ending so popular at postwar midcentury. He is fully the latter here, by 1943. In many ways the story seems designed merely to spring its gotcha surprise, rather than offer any insight about Jack the Ripper or his legend.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

"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
Read story online (scroll down).

"Sweets to the Sweet" (1947)

How do you solve a problem like Robert Bloch (sung to the tune of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" from The Sound of Music)? I mean, he has all the bona fides: corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft as a teen when he first started publishing, wrote the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, grew up in Milwaukee, published hundreds of stories in all the right places (from Weird Tales to Playboy), wrote scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and many others, and won enough awards to melt down and build a tank, if he were so inclined. The My Favorite Horror Story anthology, published in 2000, asked leading horror lights of the day to name and write an intro about [the title]. Bloch and Lovecraft were the only writers with two stories, and this story by Bloch was the choice of Stephen King. How can I argue with that? I can't. "Sweets to the Sweet" is not a bad story and even very good of a type. The main feature is its twist ending, which is hard to see coming because Bloch uses misdirection well (the misdirection is child abuse but apparently we are letting that pass because 1947 or something). But "Sweets to the Sweet" is also entirely typical of the problems of Bloch's stories, which is that if he can't scare you at least maybe he can make you laugh or if not that force a groan with some terrible pun. I’m addicted to brake fluid, but it’s OK because I can stop at any time. Let's not forget the jokey undercurrents about mothers in Psycho (Norman Bates: "Well, a boy's best friend is his mother")—that's Bloch as well as Hitchcock. "Sweets to the sweet"—well, you'll have to read this one to get that because I'm not going to give too much away. You may as well enjoy Bloch at about the best I've seen him while I complain about everything else. Instead, I'll give away "Catnip," a minor effort from the following year published in Weird Tales. Like a lot of his stuff, it feels like a hurry-up first draft never looked at again. All you really need to know about it is its dependence on hatred and fear of black cats and the old figure of speech, "Cat got your tongue?" to understand the arc and get the joke of this story about an unlikely bully and a witch. In Playboy in the early '60s, for another example, Bloch published a story called "The Traveling Salesman," which features the alleged actual traveling salesman from all the jokes I'm pretty sure nobody tells anymore, now more or less relics from the Johnny Carson era. This guy's life is hell because he has to go and act out every new traveling salesman joke that comes along. Hyuk-hyuk. It's not horror, it's a gag. In a lot of his stories Bloch comes across like a stand-up comic teetering on the verge of a bad flop sweat episode. He evokes the elements of horror—gore, mayhem, grotesqueries—but they're more like shtick on the way to the punchline. And if that don't work: What did one eye say to the other? Just between you and me, something smells. I understand the impulse to laugh at the whole horror game because, yes, it's all pretty silly when it comes down to it. These are just make-believe stories, of course! But uh the wise-guy routine sort of spoils the mood, and even if Bloch did hit a few twist endings pretty well—no small feat, I admit—I can't help feeling just a little bit taken by most of his stuff.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg (out of print)
When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Listen to story online.

"A Toy for Juliette" (1967)

Robert Bloch's turn at the Dangerous Visions open mic comes with a long backstory and a surprise sequel. Bloch, who is probably best known today for writing the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is based. was an early acolyte and correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft. In 1943, Bloch published one of his most famous stories, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," which imagines the legendary London serial killer as an immortal being who must kill women periodically to live on. In many ways the story made Bloch's career. It was often anthologized and often imitated. With that in mind, almost 25 years later, editor Harlan Ellison asked Bloch to write a story for this collection about Jack the Ripper in the future. This story is the result. However, in his lengthy introduction to the story—which is actually longer than the story itself, and includes direct input from Bloch—Ellison admits it wasn't the story he had been thinking of. It is certainly solid in terms of psychotic cruelty, sadism, etc., which Bloch was good at. Practically clinical, in fact. Still, Ellison had his idea and asked Bloch's permission to do his own version of Jack the Ripper in the future, and also asks him to write the introduction for it (you can see that these story introductions and afterwords are a lively and integral part of the collection). That's the next story in this special two-part episode, which Ellison counsels us to read in tandem—the whole thing, both introductions, both stories, and both afterwords by the Ellison/Bloch tag team. More on that next. "A Toy for Juliette," meanwhile, is basically a chamber drama with a time travel sideshow involving sadists. Or psychopaths or sociopaths—always get those two mixed up. It's post-apocalyptic times in the future. Not many humans on the planet. Juliette and her grandfather are hunkered up in some stronghold, from which Grandfather time travels, collecting specimens from the past. Bloch goes a bit far in suggesting they include Amelia Earhart and other famous disappearing people. Once Juliette gets hold of them she tortures them to death. The story spends a considerable amount of time on her methods. Then Jack the Ripper shows up as a specimen—he's another famous disappearing person, of course (conceivably, Grandfather could get around to the Zodiac killer as well). "A Toy for Juliette" is a creepy and unpleasant story, and totally professional. We'll see what Ellison had in mind for the Jack the Ripper scenario next.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison