“Unheavenly Twin” (Strange Stories, June 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “Unheavenly Twin.” The Vampire Stories of Robert Bloch, edited by Stephen Haffner, Haffner Press, 2026.  

The narrator of the story introduces himself as a member of a traveling circus “freak show.” He has no arms, and so he types the story using only his feet, a fact that seems normal to him. The traveling troupe lives together in a rooming house during the off-season. They socialize and generally have a great time together, except for Count Vomar, who keeps to himself. His act is that he is a strange kind of twin with a living—something—attached to his midsection. As they get acquainted, Vomar explains to the narrator that it is an undeveloped twin, a brother with a tiny head, arms, discreet organs, and the ability to move. During the course of the winter, Vomar becomes more agitated, saying that the twin is compelling him to do things, threatening that the twin will take over the body soon. Vomar calls him a vampire of sorts, sucking life from the host so that it can live. Vomar has his meals delivered to his room. Soon, his food just sits outside of his room untouched. The narrator is worried and enlists the landlord to help him to get into Vomar’s room. Inside, they find Vomar dead, his body gaunt and emaciated. The twin had drained him of life, but not before Vomar used a knife to end the life of his twin.

Because Bloch is so skilled at puns and wordplay of all kinds, I googled “heavenly twin” to see what he might be up to with this title. Well, that was an hour of my life… The stars Castor and Pollux are frequently called “heavenly twins,” although many cultures seems to have their own version of mythical brothers. Across many religions, we all have a twin that exists in a heavenly dimension; it represents our best self, those parts of us that pull us toward righteousness. Bloch’s title here is a play on that, it seems. The twin sapping the life form Count Vomar is the opposite of how Judeo-Christian tradition might characterize the other version of ourself that pulls us toward goodness. Interestingly, there is a novel by Sarah Grand titled Heavenly Twins (1893) that was a runaway bestseller even during Bloch’s childhood. It was the first, according to Maragret Drabble, that dealt clearly and deeply with sexually transmitted diseases and female sexuality: “She achieved sensational success with The Heavenly Twins (1893), which attacked the sexual double standard in marriage and dealt frankly with the dangers of syphilis and the immorality of the Contagious Diseases Act. This novel launched her on a public career as a New Woman (a phrase she was said to have coined in 1894); she lectured and wrote extensively and was for six years (1922-9) mayoress of Bath.” (Drabble 426). This is not quite a great story by Bloch, but it does have enough familiar elements—circus performers on winter break, the concept of a dual consciousness in a single body, the trauma of an observer—to make it a fun read.