“The Dark Demon” (Weird Tales, November 1936)

Bloch, Robert. “The Dark Demon.” Weird Tales, November, 1936, pp. 449-456. https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV28N04193611/page/n65/mode/2up

The story opens with a narrator who should be familiar to readers of Lovecraft: the survivor who has an impossible story to tell. In this case, it is about Edgar Gordon, a writer and mentor who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The narrator wants to tell the story so that people will know the truth. He never had much of an audience for his fiction, but as his writing got more and more strange, demand for his work dried up completely. He tells the narrator that he no longer cares if anyone reads his work. He says that his work always originated in his dreams but that now his writing was being dictated to him by creatures that closely resemble those horrors found in eldritch books such as the Necronomicon and Mysteries of the Worm. 

Gordon talks about the coming time when those horrors would merge with him so that they could enter our reality. The narrator is so afraid for his friend that he goes to his house late at night with the idea of rescuing him. Instead, he finds that the merging has already taken place, He shoots at the thing—a being in the old man’s clothes that resembles Gordon’s descriptions of Asmodeus. He takes all of Gordon’s writing, rushes back home, and burns all of the pages. The police find nothing but Gordon’s clothes. There is no sign of the old man anywhere. Gordon is officially a missing person, but the narrator knows that somewhere now Asmodeus roams our reality.

For those who know the history that Bloch had with HP Lovecraft, a section that comes early in the story will seem nothing if not autobiographical: 

​Being a hopeful (and at times, hopeless) amateur writer myself, I was enormously influenced and impressed by his work in the various magazines catering to the fantastic literature I loved. At this time, he was known in a small way to practically all readers of such journals as an exceptionally erudite writer of horror tales. His style had won him renown in this small field, though even then there were those who professed to scoff at the grotesquery of his themes.
​
But I ardently admired him… [He] had no contact with his friends save through correspondence. His mailing-list, however, was voluminous. He exchanged letters with authors and editors all over the country; would-be writers, aspiring journalists, and thinkers and students everywhere. Once his reserve was penetrated, he seemed pleased to have my friendship. Needless to say, I was delighted.
What Edgar Gordon did for me in the next three years can never adequately be told. His able assistance, friendly criticism and kind encouragement finally succeeded in making a writer of sorts out of me, and after that our mutual interest formed an added bond between us. (450)

Randall Larson labels this story as a Lovecraft pastiche, a young Bloch imitating a type of cosmic horror that Lovecraft had largely abandoned in favor of stories about science opening up heretofore unknown realms to the foolish few who seek knowledge. Interestingly Larson describes the evolution of the unnamed narrator’s thinking about Gordon’s predicament as a move from science to something other—the opposite of where Lovecraft was headed with his fiction: “He reacts to Gordon’s admissions about the demon with typical skepticism pigeon-holing Gordon in neat Freudian psychology—until he finds it no longer fits and is forced to concede the reality of supernatural malevolencies” (Larson Robert 20). Finally, this is the second story so far (after “The Feast in the Abbey”) that features a very particular depiction of the demon, Asmodeus: “a black, furry creature with the snout of a hog, green eyes, and the dreadful fangs and talons of some wild beast” (456). I know a little bit about depictions of Asmodeus thanks to my friend Rob Stauffer. The Book of Tobit, the Talmud, and the testament of Solomon are ancient sources. He appears in Malleus Maleficarum (1486), The Lesser Key of Solomon (mid-17th century) Alain de Sage’s Devil on Two Sticks (1707), Dictionnaire Infernal (1818) by Jacques Collin de Plancy, and the AD&D Monster Manual (1977). I do not yet have Davina Wright’s Asmodeus, but I will get it soon (or at least Rob will tell me about it 😊). There is nothing in any of them that comes close to Bloch’s physical description of Asmodeus, and so I can’t help wondering where it came from. More research is required, of course.