“The Laughter of a Ghoul” (The Fantasy Fan, December 1934)

This story shows clearly the influence of Lovecraft on a very young Bloch. The “lord of an ancient, remote line” and his wife take residence in their remote manor within a brooding forest. There is indescribable thing something there in the trees and caves that takes hold of the lady on an innocent summer walk, leaving her in “a condition of unsensibility.” She does not recover. In blind rage, the man takes “the long sword my grand-sire had wielded in the Orient” into “the Rood-mass realms of Nightmare” and slays the beast. The lady was pregnant at the time of the attack and brings the baby to term during the ensuing months while her husband is left to “toss for many weeks […] in the delirious agony of mocking, cacodemoniacal memory.” She dies in childbirth and the baby that remains is somehow ghoul-spawn as much as human. The “laughter” in the title? As the story closes, it emanates from the baby. 

This story as published in The Fantasy Fan alongside a story by Clark Ashton Smith and part VII of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” by HP Lovecraft. It must have thrilled the seventeen-year-old Bloch to discover his place among his heroes. As much as it imitates the style of Lovecraft, the story does not work particularly well. It holds the reader at bay, telling but not showing the reader the “forlorn realm of trickling tarns and baleful solitude” and other fell locales. Bloch is on the path from HPL imitator to discovering his unique voice, and this story is an important one for readers to experience despite its shortcomings. For one thing, it creates a kind of baseline from which comparisons to later stories can be made.

One other note: it is always fun to tease out the allusions in Bloch’s work. In this case, one sentence is particularly intriguing: “At last the day arrived when, as I brooded in my study, poring over the chronicle of a woodsman who had heard the pipes of Pan…” Bloch likely was familiar with Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), but that novel does not describe a woodsman. “The Pipes of Pan” (1899) by Aidrian Ross is a poem that comes close to Bloch’s description. There is also a 1914 film starring Lon Chaney that features a hand-colored sequence involving Pan in the midst of a black-and-white film. That must have been amazing, especially at the time, but we will never see it for ourselves: the film has been declared lost forever. In ancient myth, Pan has a strong sexual side to him. There is evidence that the woman in Bloch’s story was impregnated by the beast in the forest, and so perhaps the brief allusion to Pan in the story evokes the god’s erotic possibilities, as well. Scholars have pointed to these decades as a time when female sexual agency was being asserted and Pan invoked in that cause. A likely possibility is that Bloch had read Lord Dunsany’s “The Blessing of Pan” (1927) and went with the version of the god, one who inspires scandalous revelry among the young.

Bloch’s story can be found here on Project Gutenberg.