“The Thing” (The Quill, April 1932)

A short account of a narrator who has been escorted by an entity whose “bony fingers seared like the flames of Hell” to a nightmare realm where ravenous beasts feast on the living people who seemed unable to die, who writhed in the horror of being consumed for what appeared to be an eternity. The encounter terrified the narrator who, at the end of the story, begged to be returned to his previous existence on Earth: “but I knew in my heart I would never see Earth again, for I had been dying of fever and this smiling Thing was DEATH!” Even at the age of fourteen, there is the surprise ending we have grown to love from Bloch’s writing. In the 1993 reprint by The Pretension Press, Bloch wrote an introduction that explained this story as a parody of Lovecraft’s style. I don’t want to disagree with the old master, but it seems to me more likely that this weas an earnest attempt to write in the style of Lovecraft, to create the kind of scary story he loved form the pages of Weird Tales and other magazines of horror. It is a very short story and not a particularly effective one, but, for a kid, it represents a great start!