“The Grip of Death” (Strange Stories, December 1939)

​Bloch, Robert, and Henry Kuttner. “The Grip of Death.” Strange Stories, December 1939, pp. 85-91.
archive.org/details/str-1939-12/page/84/mode/2up

Luke Holland thinks himself clever—more clever than his abusive and oppressive Uncle Lionel. Lionel is an old man who has collected a library filled with arcane tomes: books on the occult, witchcraft, and magic. He has kept his vast wealth away from Luke and insisted that Luke be with him always, to act as his cook, his cleaner, and his servant. Luke had had enough; he decides to kill the old man. Lionel warns him that if Luke ever feels like murder, it will not go well for him. Luke decides to poison Lionel’s wine. He serves it to Lionel who insists that they share a drink. Luke drinks his nervously, but Lionel abstains. Lionel informs Luke that he has been poisoned, Luke had been warned. The type of poison Lionel has used induces a state not unlike rigor mortis except that the brain remains active and alert while the body petrifies. In a rage, 

Luke attacks Lionel, his hands clenched around his uncle’s throat until the old man stops breathing. Unfortunately for Luke, the poison acts quickly: his hands stiffen and he cannot unclench them from their death grip. His legs are nearly useless, and so in desperation he drags the old man into the hallway looking for some way to disengage his hands from the corpse’s neck. He crashes down the stairs but cannot manage to use the knife that he sees. Not even his mouth works anymore. He manages to get back upstairs and, in his final moment of control over his body, hurls himself from the window hoping that the impact below will break the grip. When the police arrive, they find him hanging from the window. Uncle Lionel’s stiff body had wedged itself into the window frame. As promised by Uncle Lionel, a small sign appears at the end of the story to indicate that Luke’s mind is still active inside a body that otherwise shows no signs of life. 

Such a strange, violent, gruesome story! For a writer not very interested in body horror, this one—with its connected corpses, the double murders, and that grisly ending—comes close to the kind of horror that became popular decades later. The character of Uncle Lionel we have seen a few times in Lovecraft’s work (think the Terrible Old Man or Old Whateley, for two examples), and we will see him often in Bloch tales to come. In Bloch, the first similar character I thought about appears in “Lizzie Borden Took and Axe” (1946), a story that features an oppressed woman at the mercy of her ancient guardian, the malevolent Uncle Gideon, whose library is filled with similar ancient tomes of magic and demonology: “Anita told me. Told me of the locked rooms upstairs where the old man sat mumbling over the moldering books he’d hidden away there. She told me of his feuds with farmers; his open boastings of the ‘hex’ he put on cattle, the blights he claimed to visit upon crops” (Bloch “Lizzie” 68). That Uncle Lionel had money and Luke did not add a mundane motive for what became a lurid affair. Henry Kuttner was not credited anywhere in the original magazine but has been listed as a coauthor for this story thereafter. There so nothing fun about this story. A conscious corpse hanging out a window! How do you top that?