“A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff” (Weird Tales, September 1941)

Bloch, Robert. “A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff.” Weird Tales, September 1941, pp. 69-82.
archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v36n01_1941-09/page/n69/mode/2up

Allan Wando is a glad-hander and socialite whose presence at every social event in town irks the narrator, a writer named Bob. He pulls Bob aside one day and tells him he is planning a run for sheriff and he wants Bob to write speeches for him: “Just knock me out a few patriotic phrases, wave the flag a little, and I’ll do the rest. I’ve got my financial backing all set, and the boys will be around passing out the beer — the usual campaign. So what do you say?” (70). Bob snoops around Wando’s home and discovers to his great surprise, given what he knows about Wando, books on witchcraft and the occult. Wando gathers the group together and announces that he has a project for them. He has a hunk of church wax that he asks everyone to mold into the shape of Adolph Hitler and then concentrate all of their hatred into the little figure. Then, all at once, they will stab the little doll in the brain with a needle. 

When they do that, one of the women in attendance dies. The doctor attributes it to the stress of the evening, although Bob suspects otherwise. He inspects the doll that Wando used and it, does, indeed, have a single blonde hair from the dead woman’s head molded into it, just as the occult lore instructs. Wando’s campaign opens, but Wando does very few public appearances. Instead, he spends his time with three frightening men who seem to always be at his side. As Bob gets his hair cut, the barber tells him that Wando bought the excess hair of the incumbent sheriff after a recent haircut. Bob tries to warn him but is knocked unconscious before he can communicate the news. Later that day, Bob attends a political rally. Wando and his thugs perform a ritual, and the incumbent sheriff drops dead. The doctor says the cause is natural, but Bob knows otherwise. Bob and the doctor go to Wando’s apartment to confront the sorcerer. Wando admits to everything and has dolls made up for both Bob and the doctor. He holds them at gunpoint and explains his plan to rule the world using witchcraft. Wando stabs the wax figure and falls dead himself. Bob was able to swap the doll that contained his own hair with one that contained Wando’s. Bob tosses the dolls into the fire and attributes Wando’s death to stress. As the wax melts in the fireplace, so does the body of Wando. 

Well, this one is a bit of a reach. It features the character of “Bob,” a writer who works on political campaigns. In 1939, Bloch helped carl Zeidler run a successful campaign to unseat six-term Milwaukee mayor, Daniel Hoan. There is not much in this story about politics—it is mostly just a setting and a plot device—but it does show that Bloch was drawing on what he knew. There is an intriguing mention of William Seabrook as the idea that a wax figure could be imbued with enough of a person’s spirit to kill or main them. Seabrook is known for a few things, prominent among them cannibalism (see his Wikipedia page). He is responsible for bringing the idea of zombies to the American mainstream with his book, The Magic Island ((1929). More relevant to this story, however, is his book, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1940). The first section of this book is titled “The Witch and the Doll,” and it describes the use of “voodoo dolls” in ways that Bloch seems to have drawn from for this story. There are photos of Bloch in his library from several different eras, and I would love to see an accounting of these books. As a high-school graduate, Bloch is a fine example of the power of books to bring the whole world to one’s hands. Anyone who is able to read can experience anything they want across space and time—it is truly the best kind of magic. As far as I know (and I have spoken to a few people about this), the library is long gone but for books where Bloch’s own writing appears. Alas.