“The Grinning Ghoul” (Weird Tales, June 1936)

Bloch, Robert. “The Grinning Ghoul.” Weird Tales, June, 1936, pp. 720-727. https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV27N06193606/page/n81/mode/2up
(Many of these early stories are available via archive.org, so I will include a link—if one is available—to make it easy for someone to read along.)

A psychiatrist tells his own story that begins with his own institutionalization—a development he disagrees with thoroughly. The story begins with his defense of his own sanity. He met professionally with a man named Professor Alexander Chaupin who began to talk unguardedly about his dreams. He went each night to the same cemetery and to the same locked tomb, entering it confidently and without difficulty. He delved deep underground where he sees strange and horrific creatures that ignore his presence. He calls them ghouls. He then told of discovering the actual location where his dreams were set and learning about ghouls from ancient books such as Mysteries of the Worm and the Necronomicon. The psychiatrist remained in control, pointing out that his research was undoubtedly influencing his dreams and making him anxious about nothing. 

The professor did not waver, and so the psychiatrist proposed to meet him at the cemetery the following night to show him his folly. The professor led the psychiatrist confidently to the tomb which as exactly as he described. They descended the secret steps into a realm of rats and darkness. The professor asked the psychiatrist to wait for a moment so that he could find proof for all that he had talked about. The doctor was left to his own fears and wild imaginings: “The blue light cast screening shadows on the stalactitical walls and crowded closely around the dim circle of luminance afforded by my tiny torch. I did not like those shadows: they were distorted, unhealthy, disconcertingly deep. The silence was even more potent: it seemed to hint of nameless things yet to come; it mocked unbearably my growing fear and loneliness. The minutes crawled like maggots on their way, and nothing broke that deadly stillness” (726). A hideous scream sent the psychiatrist running back toward the stairs, the sound of many footfalls pursuing him. he reached the top and looked back once to see the army of ghouls in pursuit—led by the thing that had been Professor Chaupin!
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We’ve got another first for Bloch—a story with a psychiatrist at its center! There is much evidence here of the nineteen-year-old Bloch delving into Psychiatry. The demeanor and logical process of the psychiatrist is especially believable as he contemplates diagnoses for both Professor Chaupin and himself. As in much of Lovecraft, the horrors are glimpsed briefly, and a survivor lives to tell the tale. As you might have surmised from the summary above, this story shares much with “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” The rationale for the existence of the ghouls is unexplained, and their presence in the dreams of Professor Chaupin remains a mystery. The thing happened, the psychiatrist assures us, but we get no closer to understanding it than we were at the start of the story. As Randall Larson points out, this story repeats a formula that was used not just by Bloch but by many in the Weird Tales Stable: “scoffing narrator who… eats his words as the truth is made gruesomely plain” (Larson Robert 20). Nevertheless, it is a fun story, for sure.