“Beauty’s Beast” (Weird Tales, May 1941)

Bloch, Robert. “Beauty’s Beast.” Weird Tales, May 1941, pp. 79-90.
archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v35n09_1941-05/page/n79/mode/2up

Peg and the narrator are a couple who could not be more different from each other. When one says up, the other says down. They walk to a party that the narrator does not want to attend—and if they do attend, he’d prefer to drive—and they stop at a pet store, lured inside by a cute puppy in the window. They are met by the owner, Mardu, a man who appears to be from India, who promises them that he has something much more suitable than a puppy. He brings them to the back of the store past exotic animals of all kinds, to where a monkey named Hanuman lives. Peg is instantly smitten—perhaps mildly hypnotized—and decides she cannot live without this monkey. The narrator just wants to get out of the store, and ten dollars seems a small price to pay to get them on their way. The first hint of what might be happening occurs when Peg is outside and gets her first good look at her new pet monkey. She thinks about the monkey’s relationship with the shopkeeper: “Honestly, I’ll bet he’s a wonderful man. The way he handled those animals. Like some old Brahmin priest or something. Don’t the Hindus believe that animals have human souls? Reincarnation, isn’t it?” (83). Hanuman is tame and docile and clings to Peg silently.

At the party, one of their friends tells of her sister’s trip to the pet store where, lured by the puppy in the window, she instead fell in love with a cobra and brought it home. The narrator compares Hanuman to an incubus (84) in another moment of possible foreshadowing. The owner of the snake dies of an apparent heart attack, and the pet store owner immediately arrives to retrieve the snake. The narrator interrogates Peg and finds out she has been having vivid dreams about Hanuman. Peg talks about the things that Mardu has told her abut Hindu beliefs and especially about reincarnation. He provides a silver pipe to each new pet owner so that they can play music to their animal each day. Peg gets so roiled that she faints. The narrator has heard enough and attempts to take the pipe away from the monkey. A storm rages outside, and the house loss power. In the chaos, Peg and the narrator realize simultaneously that Mardu must be a follower of the Hindu god of Death and Hell, and that his plan all along is to sow suffering and death with these “pets.” The narrator runs to his apartment to get his gun, and, by the time he returns to Peg, she is dead. He sees a different look in the eyes of the monkey now, something uncanny that reminds him strongly of Peg. He out of the house into the storm heading for the pet store. Inside, at the height of the raging storm, he is surrounded by strangely quiet animals, all of which look at him with uncanny intelligence in their eyes. Together with Hanuman/Peg, the narrator opens the cage of a poisonous snake. They find Mardu asleep in the back room. The snake attacks and kills Mardu. The monkey is gone. Through a rising flood, the narrator returns to Peg’s apartment. She is awake again with no memory, she says, of the events of the day.

I haven’t written at all about the illustrations within each magazine that contain a Bloch story. In this case, the drawing for the first page of the story is particularly striking. It is signed BOK, which is how the great Hannes Bok signed his work. I just went down that rabbit hole—one I had never before entered except through some class-lecture research into the great Maragret Brundage—and discovered how prolific and influential Hannes Bok was. He painted many (150?) covers for fantasy magazines and also hundreds of interior drawings like the one on the first page of “Beauty’s Beast.” The first year that Hugo Awards were given (1953), he shared the award for best cover artist with Ed Emshwiller, husband of Carol. While they were both living in Los Angeles, the twenty-five-year-old Bok was friends with nineteen-year-old Ray Bradbury; both were complete unknowns. Bradbury was so impressed with Bok’s artwork that he lugged a portfolio to the 1st World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1939. Bradbury showed the work to Farnsworth Wright who began a professional relationship with Bok that would last fifteen years. He also published writing of his own, including short stories, poems, and two novels. Bok became a penniless recluse and died at the age of forty-nine. Finnish SF author Emil Petaja established the Bokanalia Foundation to keep the legacy of Bok alive. There are a few very interesting collections of Bok’s art in book form, including a 2012 edition by Centipede Press that spans 450 pages!