On "The Feast in the Abbey"
by Randall D. Larson
by Randall D. Larson
“The Feast in the Abbey was Robert Bloch’s first professionally published story, a short 2500-word piece appearing in Weird Tales for January 1935. This was actually Bloch’s second sale to the magazine; the first, “The Secret in the Tomb,” was published in the May 1935 issue. It is fortunate that “Feast” was published first because “Secret”—an interesting if weak story about a man who discovers that his ancestor is a ghoul—would not have gotten Bloch off to as good a start as did the other tale, especially inasmuch as Weird Tales fans were somewhat up-in-arms over Bloch’s recent angry fan letter condemning Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories (WT, November 1934). As Sam Moskowitz pointed out in his Bloch biography, if “Secret” had been printed first, “there would have been a literary massacre.” As it was, reader comment on “Feast in the Abbey” was “begrudgingly favorable.” 1
Prior to his publication in Weird Tales, a few of Bloch’s stories had been published in fanzines such as The Fantasy Fan and William Crawford’s Marvel Tales. Bloch sold “The Feast in the Abbey” when he was 17 years old—and its sale began a professional career that is still going strong, and which eventually brought Bloch fame and recognition as one of the finest writers of terror tales and psychological thrillers.
The story is a short piece of weird horror, depending upon its last line to give it “punch.” This kind of format has become characteristic of Bloch’s short fiction: the story progresses to a certain point at which Bloch unleashes an often morbid shock punch-line, as though leading the reader up a garden path only to shove him quickly over the edge of a high cliff at the end. These short horror tales hold up well to repeated readings, like macabre little jokes which retain the power to convulse the listener on each retelling. This is a style Bloch learned from H. P. Lovecraft, his literary mentor, although Bloch’s use of the final punch line was substantially different, as we shall see. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Bloch began his superb use of psychological horror and macabre humor that have since become his forte.
“The Feast in the Abbey” is quite imitative of H. P. Lovecraft in many ways. Among the most conspicuous of these is simply the language of the work, with its formal narrative style and atmospherically vivid descriptions. The lack of dialogue in the story also reflects this influence, as dialogue has often been considered Lovecraft’s weakest area. The use of blacks as the only slaves in the story, who come and go like silent commodities, may be a reflection of Lovecraft’s racism (they are first described archaically as “blackamoors”). 2
As Bloch wrote more and more, the imitative qualities which were effective in early stories became more forced. As Moskowitz has pointed out, Bloch “seemed unaware that in his later writings Lovecraft had abandoned the supernatural in explaining his horrors and had leaned with increasing weight on science. Bloch was actually writing pastiches of early Lovecraft.” 3 Despite this somewhat overabundant influence of the mentor, Bloch’s tale nonetheless contains elements of style that show through as his own.
The story begins amid a great storm, the same kind of storm used in so many horror settings. Yet in his descriptions, Bloch conjures up ideas that hint of terror. The sky deepened to a “sorcerous black” and the “wind droned dolefully.” The nameless narrator, enroute to meet his brother in some unidentified forested region, becomes lost in a storm and finds himself the guest of a band of monks who live in a large monastery. When Henricus, the abbot in charge of the hidden monastery, greets the narrator and begs him to “accept the hospitality of the brethren,” one is reminded of the classic greeting to Jonathan Harker in Dracula: “Enter freely, and of your own will.”
The setting inside the monastery grows strange almost at the narrator’s first entrance. The structure is a huge, aged stone building, the only one yet standing amid ruins of fallen dwellings; massive, elegant tapestries adorn the walls, and the chambers are furnished in a lavish display of ostentation. The narrator remarks to himself on the absence of any religious paraphernalia within the monastery. The fact that in a real monastery the monks would serve each other instead of having slave-like servants illustrates again how unusual, and downright unmonastic, this monastery is.
Henricus, the abbot, is the only character whose name is revealed in the story, and he is also the only member of the monkish order who is singled out to be described. The other brethren are only seen during the great feast in the banquet hall and described as gorging themselves in a very unmannerly fashion. Bloch describes them as “Flemish barbarians” and “abominable boors,” and the fancy banquet set in front of them is compared to “pearls cast before swine.” This last invokes in an ironic fashion the biblical atmosphere (Matthew 7:6) so conspicuously absent from the monastery itself. The adjectives used not only reinforce the pig-like eating habits of the monastery denizens, but also hint at Bloch’s use of play-on-words and tongue-in-cheek language which would later become his trademark: the monks are “eagerly assailing the multitudinous array of foodstuffs”; they “continued to devour rapaciously”; “they wallowed in every kind of fruit”; “they have trenchermannish appetites.” (This last is even more significant in relation to their ghoulish character as revealed at the ending.)
Bloch sums up the feast—which culminates with the serving of “a single haunch of some smoking meat”—as an odd combination of “barbaric dalliance and kingly pomp.” Ther term “dalliance” is interesting in this context. Generally defined as meaning “a toying,” it subtly suggests that the monkish clan is toying with the narrator, prolonging his enjoyment of the strange banquet for some unknown reason of their own.
This reason is revealed after the roast is consumed by the monks and their guest. The narrator remarks that “the meat was particularly rich and sweet.” The company breaks into lascivious song and drunken revelry. The narrator, remaining apart from this merriment, studies the faces of the monks before him. The mirth gives way to “less savory things,” the candles dim, and the deepening shadows weave “their webs of darkness about the banquet board.” This metaphor suggests a trap the narrator has become entangled in—the fly helpless in the web of the spider.
Henricus tells the narrator of a legendary “Devil’s Monastery” supposedly located in these same woods—an abandoned priory taken over by a “strange company of the Undead, devoted to the service of Asmodeus.” The old ruins, upon the coming of darkness, take on a “preternatural semblance of their vanished glory, and the old walls are reconstructed by demon artistry to beguile the passing traveler.” (One suddenly recalls the earlier description of the monastery being the single standing structure amid the ruins of long-decayed rubble.)
Father Henricus remarks that it is fortunate that the narrator, who is out searching for his missing brother, had not blundered upon the accursed “and had been bewitched into entrance, whereupon according to the ancient chronicles he would be seized, and his body devoured in triumph by the ghoulish acolytes that they might preserve their unnatural lives with mortal sustenance.”
Immediately the reader realizes that this is no mere legend, but that this is the Devil’s Monastery, and the narrator is trapped within it. The sparse references to the narrator’s brother are forgotten as we see the narrator caught in this trap. We expect that something will happen to the narrator at this point, that he will be attacked (though we presume he will survive, since the story is written in the first person). But we are not expecting the ending that will take place.
Then, three things happened simultaneously. The abbot slowly lifted the lid of the small tray before him. (“Let us finish the meat,” I think he said.) Then I screamed. Lastly came the merciful thunderclap that precipitated me, the laughing monks, the abbot, the platter and the monastery into chaotic oblivion.
The ending itself is clearly Lovecraftian. Uncountable numbers of stories by HPL and his students depict the narrator, upon realization of some dread but for the present unspoken truth, fleeing the scene, often describing the inability later to forget the terror. Finally at the story’s ending line, the narrator explains just what it was, in a flashback, that caused his fear-crazed flight and subsequent nightmarish remembrance.
I can never forget the place, nor the chanting, nor the dreadful brethren, but I pray to God that I can forget one thing before I die; that which I saw before the thunderbolt; the thing that maddens me and torments me all the more in view of what I have since learned in Vironne. I know it is all true, now, and I can bear the knowledge, but I can never bear the menace nor the memory of what I saw when the abbot Henricus lifted up the lid of the small silver platter to disclose the rest of the meat…
It was the head of my brother.
A good example of this device is in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness,” while the too-convenient lightning bolt is lifted bodily from “The Picture in the House.”
Whereas Lovecraft’s endings serve to confirm what the narrator has suspected all along and to cap the story with a slow wave of sweeping terror, Bloch’s endings tend to be more surprising, revealing a hitherto unexpected facet of the story which gives it a whole new meaning, ending it with a sudden hammer blow of shock and surprise.
Lovecraft often presented his revelation at the end of a longer buildup sentence, giving it the quality of a symphonic piece growing to its gradual crescendo, as with “The Outsider”:
…This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
Similarly, compare “The Dunwich Horror”:
But as to this thing we’ve just sent back—the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big for the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was his own twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.
Bloch, on the other hand, has placed the shock sentence apart from the buildup, which gives it the quality of a jarring cymbal crash following a short pause after the buildup. Many of Bloch’s subsequent stories, especially those after he vacated the imitative Lovecraftian mold, have used this same approach, as in “I Like Blondes,” “Catnip,” “The Unspeakable Betrothal,” “Talent,” and “The Closer of the Way,” a self-parody which satirizes the denouement of “Feast” itself (“It was the head of my psychiatrist”). The style is particularly evident in his novels, or individual chapters of the novels, such as Psycho, Night-World, and American Gothic.
All of Bloch’s terror tales of this type seem to have been written somewhat with tongue-in-cheek. Whereas Lovecraft had a definite philosophy of human insignificance and cosmic meaninglessness and constantly wrote it into his work, Bloch, except for a period during the late 50s, seems to be more of an optimist, or at least one who can see the humor in the midst of an otherwise ugly world.
“The Feast in the Abbey” was a promising start for Bloch’s professional writing career. The story reveals a craftsmanship and literary skill which Bloch was to refine and develop throughout the next fifty years. Even in his first professionally published story, elements of his own style can be clearly detected in in a midst of a narrative otherwise dominated by the influence of his mentor.
Much of this style, however, is unconscious to Bloch, as he wrote recently, reflecting upon this story: “I wrote—and still write—without much premeditation; all I meant to do was emulate H. P. Lovecraft’s style and/or Clark Ashton Smith’s, while aiming for a punch-line ending. And although the style has altered, I rather doubt if I’ve made any other significant change in my approach over all these years.” 4
NOTES
1 Sam Moskowitz, “’Psycho’-Logical Bloch,” Amazing Stories, December 1962, p112.
2 This is not to imply that the teenage Bloch absorbed HPL’s racist attitudes, but rather simply that he sought to attain the Lovecraftian “feel” in the story by using certain types of characters as Lovecraft would have used them; in other words, the failure of screen adaptations that give un-Lovecraftian prominence to female love interests or virile young heroes.
3 Moskowitz, pp. 114-115.
4 Robert Bloch, letter to the author, February 8, 1979.
This essay originally appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu #40 (Vol. 5, No. 6; St. John’s Eve 1986) and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
Prior to his publication in Weird Tales, a few of Bloch’s stories had been published in fanzines such as The Fantasy Fan and William Crawford’s Marvel Tales. Bloch sold “The Feast in the Abbey” when he was 17 years old—and its sale began a professional career that is still going strong, and which eventually brought Bloch fame and recognition as one of the finest writers of terror tales and psychological thrillers.
The story is a short piece of weird horror, depending upon its last line to give it “punch.” This kind of format has become characteristic of Bloch’s short fiction: the story progresses to a certain point at which Bloch unleashes an often morbid shock punch-line, as though leading the reader up a garden path only to shove him quickly over the edge of a high cliff at the end. These short horror tales hold up well to repeated readings, like macabre little jokes which retain the power to convulse the listener on each retelling. This is a style Bloch learned from H. P. Lovecraft, his literary mentor, although Bloch’s use of the final punch line was substantially different, as we shall see. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Bloch began his superb use of psychological horror and macabre humor that have since become his forte.
“The Feast in the Abbey” is quite imitative of H. P. Lovecraft in many ways. Among the most conspicuous of these is simply the language of the work, with its formal narrative style and atmospherically vivid descriptions. The lack of dialogue in the story also reflects this influence, as dialogue has often been considered Lovecraft’s weakest area. The use of blacks as the only slaves in the story, who come and go like silent commodities, may be a reflection of Lovecraft’s racism (they are first described archaically as “blackamoors”). 2
As Bloch wrote more and more, the imitative qualities which were effective in early stories became more forced. As Moskowitz has pointed out, Bloch “seemed unaware that in his later writings Lovecraft had abandoned the supernatural in explaining his horrors and had leaned with increasing weight on science. Bloch was actually writing pastiches of early Lovecraft.” 3 Despite this somewhat overabundant influence of the mentor, Bloch’s tale nonetheless contains elements of style that show through as his own.
The story begins amid a great storm, the same kind of storm used in so many horror settings. Yet in his descriptions, Bloch conjures up ideas that hint of terror. The sky deepened to a “sorcerous black” and the “wind droned dolefully.” The nameless narrator, enroute to meet his brother in some unidentified forested region, becomes lost in a storm and finds himself the guest of a band of monks who live in a large monastery. When Henricus, the abbot in charge of the hidden monastery, greets the narrator and begs him to “accept the hospitality of the brethren,” one is reminded of the classic greeting to Jonathan Harker in Dracula: “Enter freely, and of your own will.”
The setting inside the monastery grows strange almost at the narrator’s first entrance. The structure is a huge, aged stone building, the only one yet standing amid ruins of fallen dwellings; massive, elegant tapestries adorn the walls, and the chambers are furnished in a lavish display of ostentation. The narrator remarks to himself on the absence of any religious paraphernalia within the monastery. The fact that in a real monastery the monks would serve each other instead of having slave-like servants illustrates again how unusual, and downright unmonastic, this monastery is.
Henricus, the abbot, is the only character whose name is revealed in the story, and he is also the only member of the monkish order who is singled out to be described. The other brethren are only seen during the great feast in the banquet hall and described as gorging themselves in a very unmannerly fashion. Bloch describes them as “Flemish barbarians” and “abominable boors,” and the fancy banquet set in front of them is compared to “pearls cast before swine.” This last invokes in an ironic fashion the biblical atmosphere (Matthew 7:6) so conspicuously absent from the monastery itself. The adjectives used not only reinforce the pig-like eating habits of the monastery denizens, but also hint at Bloch’s use of play-on-words and tongue-in-cheek language which would later become his trademark: the monks are “eagerly assailing the multitudinous array of foodstuffs”; they “continued to devour rapaciously”; “they wallowed in every kind of fruit”; “they have trenchermannish appetites.” (This last is even more significant in relation to their ghoulish character as revealed at the ending.)
Bloch sums up the feast—which culminates with the serving of “a single haunch of some smoking meat”—as an odd combination of “barbaric dalliance and kingly pomp.” Ther term “dalliance” is interesting in this context. Generally defined as meaning “a toying,” it subtly suggests that the monkish clan is toying with the narrator, prolonging his enjoyment of the strange banquet for some unknown reason of their own.
This reason is revealed after the roast is consumed by the monks and their guest. The narrator remarks that “the meat was particularly rich and sweet.” The company breaks into lascivious song and drunken revelry. The narrator, remaining apart from this merriment, studies the faces of the monks before him. The mirth gives way to “less savory things,” the candles dim, and the deepening shadows weave “their webs of darkness about the banquet board.” This metaphor suggests a trap the narrator has become entangled in—the fly helpless in the web of the spider.
Henricus tells the narrator of a legendary “Devil’s Monastery” supposedly located in these same woods—an abandoned priory taken over by a “strange company of the Undead, devoted to the service of Asmodeus.” The old ruins, upon the coming of darkness, take on a “preternatural semblance of their vanished glory, and the old walls are reconstructed by demon artistry to beguile the passing traveler.” (One suddenly recalls the earlier description of the monastery being the single standing structure amid the ruins of long-decayed rubble.)
Father Henricus remarks that it is fortunate that the narrator, who is out searching for his missing brother, had not blundered upon the accursed “and had been bewitched into entrance, whereupon according to the ancient chronicles he would be seized, and his body devoured in triumph by the ghoulish acolytes that they might preserve their unnatural lives with mortal sustenance.”
Immediately the reader realizes that this is no mere legend, but that this is the Devil’s Monastery, and the narrator is trapped within it. The sparse references to the narrator’s brother are forgotten as we see the narrator caught in this trap. We expect that something will happen to the narrator at this point, that he will be attacked (though we presume he will survive, since the story is written in the first person). But we are not expecting the ending that will take place.
Then, three things happened simultaneously. The abbot slowly lifted the lid of the small tray before him. (“Let us finish the meat,” I think he said.) Then I screamed. Lastly came the merciful thunderclap that precipitated me, the laughing monks, the abbot, the platter and the monastery into chaotic oblivion.
The ending itself is clearly Lovecraftian. Uncountable numbers of stories by HPL and his students depict the narrator, upon realization of some dread but for the present unspoken truth, fleeing the scene, often describing the inability later to forget the terror. Finally at the story’s ending line, the narrator explains just what it was, in a flashback, that caused his fear-crazed flight and subsequent nightmarish remembrance.
I can never forget the place, nor the chanting, nor the dreadful brethren, but I pray to God that I can forget one thing before I die; that which I saw before the thunderbolt; the thing that maddens me and torments me all the more in view of what I have since learned in Vironne. I know it is all true, now, and I can bear the knowledge, but I can never bear the menace nor the memory of what I saw when the abbot Henricus lifted up the lid of the small silver platter to disclose the rest of the meat…
It was the head of my brother.
A good example of this device is in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness,” while the too-convenient lightning bolt is lifted bodily from “The Picture in the House.”
Whereas Lovecraft’s endings serve to confirm what the narrator has suspected all along and to cap the story with a slow wave of sweeping terror, Bloch’s endings tend to be more surprising, revealing a hitherto unexpected facet of the story which gives it a whole new meaning, ending it with a sudden hammer blow of shock and surprise.
Lovecraft often presented his revelation at the end of a longer buildup sentence, giving it the quality of a symphonic piece growing to its gradual crescendo, as with “The Outsider”:
…This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
Similarly, compare “The Dunwich Horror”:
But as to this thing we’ve just sent back—the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big for the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was his own twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.
Bloch, on the other hand, has placed the shock sentence apart from the buildup, which gives it the quality of a jarring cymbal crash following a short pause after the buildup. Many of Bloch’s subsequent stories, especially those after he vacated the imitative Lovecraftian mold, have used this same approach, as in “I Like Blondes,” “Catnip,” “The Unspeakable Betrothal,” “Talent,” and “The Closer of the Way,” a self-parody which satirizes the denouement of “Feast” itself (“It was the head of my psychiatrist”). The style is particularly evident in his novels, or individual chapters of the novels, such as Psycho, Night-World, and American Gothic.
All of Bloch’s terror tales of this type seem to have been written somewhat with tongue-in-cheek. Whereas Lovecraft had a definite philosophy of human insignificance and cosmic meaninglessness and constantly wrote it into his work, Bloch, except for a period during the late 50s, seems to be more of an optimist, or at least one who can see the humor in the midst of an otherwise ugly world.
“The Feast in the Abbey” was a promising start for Bloch’s professional writing career. The story reveals a craftsmanship and literary skill which Bloch was to refine and develop throughout the next fifty years. Even in his first professionally published story, elements of his own style can be clearly detected in in a midst of a narrative otherwise dominated by the influence of his mentor.
Much of this style, however, is unconscious to Bloch, as he wrote recently, reflecting upon this story: “I wrote—and still write—without much premeditation; all I meant to do was emulate H. P. Lovecraft’s style and/or Clark Ashton Smith’s, while aiming for a punch-line ending. And although the style has altered, I rather doubt if I’ve made any other significant change in my approach over all these years.” 4
NOTES
1 Sam Moskowitz, “’Psycho’-Logical Bloch,” Amazing Stories, December 1962, p112.
2 This is not to imply that the teenage Bloch absorbed HPL’s racist attitudes, but rather simply that he sought to attain the Lovecraftian “feel” in the story by using certain types of characters as Lovecraft would have used them; in other words, the failure of screen adaptations that give un-Lovecraftian prominence to female love interests or virile young heroes.
3 Moskowitz, pp. 114-115.
4 Robert Bloch, letter to the author, February 8, 1979.
This essay originally appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu #40 (Vol. 5, No. 6; St. John’s Eve 1986) and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.