“The Feast in the Abbey” (Weird Tales, January 1935)

A nameless narrator embarks upon a journey through the forest to meet his brother. A storm arrives, and the narrator is desperate to find shelter. He sees a glimmer of light through the trees and is relieved to find a monastery that opens its doors to him and gives him a room. He is immediately taken aback by the lavish furnishings and the lack of any Christian iconography. His bedroom doesn’t even have a simple cross hanging on the wall. He is called to dinner and is struck by the terrible table manners of the assembled monks. Not only do they not pray before eating, they stuff themselves in a wild orgy of gluttony. At the end of the meal, the abbot stands to speak to the assembled brethren. He tells the story of a man who was lost in a wood just like the one they are in where he has the misfortune to be taken in by a sect devoted to the worship of Asmodeus.

He tells the narrator how lucky he is that he found them that stormy night as he takes the lid off of the final course in the feast. A loud clap of thunder hits, and the narrator loses consciousness. When he awakes, he is outside in the mud with his horse nearby. He makes his way in a daze to his brother’s house where the servants report that his brother ventured into the forest alone to look for him. This the narrator already knew, because the final course of the meal, as revealed by the abbot, was his brother’s head!

And here we have it—the first decapitation in Bloch’s catalogue of beheadings that stretches for the following six decades! There is so much to love about this story even if it is a Poe/Lovecraft mashup. The opening scene resembles “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the language, a Randall Larson points out, could not be more Lovecraftian in places (Larson “On ‘The Feast in the Abbey’”).

In fact, just mentioning Randall’s work here is not enough. Go to his article and read it. He goes into greater detail than I, including a more thorough job of plot summary than I did above. Most interesting to me at the moment, however, is the sidetrack that Larson mentioned in his first paragraph, how that letter disparaging Conan I mentioned in my previous entry caused a hubbub that might have reflected more badly on Bloch had his story been less weird, less frightening, less plain good than “A Feast” is. As Bloch himself said of the angry response to his Conan criticism: “It also taught me a valuable lesson. From that point on and to this very day I have avoided public criticism of my fellow writers, no matter how lousy and rotten their crummy efforts may be” (Bloch Once 72). Live and learn. This story has all of the elements that could make anyone excited about this teenage creator. The suspense rises throughout the story as the reader echoes the narrator’s suspicion of the benighted place. The final punch line lands perfectly, as well. I teach a lot of writing to people this age. If any of them handed me a story like this one, we’d have a very positive conversation. Good job, young man!