“The Black Kiss” (Weird Tales, June 1937)

Bloch, Robert, and Henry Kuttner. “The Black Kiss.” Weird Tales, June 1937, pp. 978-690.
https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV29N06193706/page/678/mode/2up

The story opens with a young artist named Graham Dean visiting a doctor’s office for advice on the disturbing dreams he has been having. He has moved into his family’s house perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean in California. The doctor is of very little help, hustling to a diagnosis and ignoring most of what Dean has to say about the “planned” nature of his dreams, how they seem to him to be malign and filled with meaning. The doctor does little more than pat him on the head and send him out with a prescription. Dean goes home thinking about the family lore, how one of his ancestors seemed to have an unhealthy and even occult relationship with the sea.  He finds a telegram from a distant uncle, an expert in occult lore, warning him to vacate the house immediately and visit a different doctor. Dean ignores the warning and falls asleep in his chair. He dreams of nightmarish sea creatures that lure him out into the depths. The dream shifts to a cave where he meets a strange woman who kisses him until her image dissolves into one of the hideous sea creatures. 

Dean is wakened by banging on his front door; his uncle’s doctor has arrived. The doctor warns him to leave the house immediately, and Dean, seemingly under the control of the beast that kissed him, agrees. But it is too late. Dean falls asleep again and swims joyfully with a pack of his brothers. They visit the site of a zeppelin crash and eagerly feast upon the human survivors. In the dream, Dean ends up in that same cave. This time, however, his uncle and the doctor are there searching for him. The sea creature has exchanged bodies with Dean, and the false Dean is in the cave now, as well. Dean attacks the thing that has possessed his body at the same moment that the doctor opens fire. Both Dean in the body of the sea creature and Dean’s body are killed simultaneously.
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This story is the result of a collaboration with Bloch’s good friend, Henry Kuttner (1915-1958). In 1937, it appeared in Weird Tales under both of their names. Kuttner was just starting out as a writer and had placed his first few stories into Weird Tales. Bloch said, “He sent me one of his rejected stories and asked if I’d rewrite it as a collaboration” (Bloch Once 79). In subsequent reprints elsewhere, Kuttner asked that his name be removed from the story. Bloch explained it this way in a 1973 letter to Randall Larson: “‘The Black Kiss’ was a collaboration with Kuttner, but apparently because I did the bulk of the writing and revision of his original story line, he later decided I should have the sole by-line and asked that it be reprinted in that manner thenceforth. So, his name came off at his request” (Larson Robert 13). Bloch plays with the idea of consciousness transference in a way similar to how he handled it in “The Eyes of the Mummy.” David Langford has a great article titled “Identity Exchange” in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Langford). There were many stories, some by luminaries such as HG Wells and HP Lovecraft, that might have given Bloch the foundation for this kind of thing. We know where Bloch went with this idea eventually—to the Bates Motel. “What Are Little Girls Made of?” and more—so it is fascinating to see him playing with the idea so early in his career.