The Cthulhu Mythos
Fiction of Robert Bloch
by Randall D. Larson
Fiction of Robert Bloch
by Randall D. Larson
Even though he has dabbled in a variety of genres and styles of fiction—from mystery and crime to zany humor and otherworldly science fiction—Robert Bloch’s primary forte remains that of the horror story.
It’s not an unlikely habitat for Bloch either. Fifty years ago he started out writing weird horror stories in the vein of his literary mentor, H. P. Lovecraft in the evocative pages of Weird Tales magazine. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Bloch experimented with a variety of styles until becoming established later in the 1940s as the master of psychological horror—that moody brand of terror that emanates, unlike Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial horrors, from within, emerging in the guise of everyday persons and events. While supernatural fantasy would make its appearance from time to time, Bloch’s personal interest and literary development found a home in the internal terrors of the abnormal psyche.
During the 1930s, however, Bloch’s work was very much in the supernatural vein of H. P. Lovecraft: both his style and theme were consciously modeled after that of his mentor. When Lovecraft’s weird fantasies began to sketch the outline of a common mythology, Bloch joined with other members of the “Lovecraft Circle”—Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner and others—to try his own hand at contributing to the myth-cycle.
The Cthulhu Mythos, as it is now known, both bespoke Lovecraft’s personal existentialist philosophy and provided some of the finest dark fantasy of the period. Bloch’s contributions, while in many cases overt imitations of Lovecraft, helped develop the Mythos by expanding its fictional library of occult books and evil creatures and eventually contributed their own brand of terror and style to the Mythos.
Bloch’s first sale to Weird Tales, “The Secret in the Tomb,” (which was kept back and published after a second, and far superior tale, “The Feast in the Abbey”), was not actually a Cthulhu Mythos story, but it did introduce Mysteries of the Worm, a legendary tome written, according to the story, by a Flemish wizard named Ludvig Prinn. Bloch used the device, as did Lovecraft and his fellow-writers, to provide and develop a realistic framework for his fictional mythology. He also referred to Lovecraft’s creation, the Necronomicon and his own Cultes des Goules, but did little more than mention these tomes in the midst of an otherwise ordinary horror story about a man who discovers his ancestor is a ghoul. Bloch’s “The Suicide in the Study” also mentioned Mysteries of the Worm as well as the Black Rites “by the mad Luveh-Keraph” (an in-joke on Lovecraft’s name, one of many perpetrated on each other by members of the Lovecraft Circle), but did little to develop Mythos themes.
“The Shambler from the Stars,” was really Bloch’s first bona fide Cthulhu Mythos story and was the beginning of one of the most remarkable trilogies in weird fiction. Bloch expanded the history of Ludvig Prinn and his eldritch volume, here referred to by its Latin title De Vermis Mysteriis, which Lovecraft had provided for him. Bloch also received permission to use Lovecraft as a character in the story, annihilating him in a particularly gruesome manner. Lovecraft returned the favor in his famous story “The Haunter in the Dark,” in which a young writer named Robert “Blake” suffers a horrible fate after seeking answers to things best left unknown. Years later, Bloch completed the trilogy with “The Shadow from the Steeple,” which followed up events from the previous story and demonstrated Bloch’s own remarkable literary growth—while the style is intentionally Lovecraftian, it is not dependently so, as his earlier works had been. “Shadow” also demonstrated the remarkable subtlety that Bloch had been employing in his work, especially in the story’s brooding denouement, which leaves the reader cold with a lasting chill, rather than simply titillating him with a short-lived shock.
Bloch’s early Mythos stories tended to be cast in the same mold, written according to a formula that ended in an often contrived, but deliciously conveyed, shock ending. “The Grinning Ghoul” and “The Dark Demon” are memorable in this vein as are Bloch’s Mythos stories involving Egyptian mythology. “The Faceless God” and “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” effectively correlated Lovecraft’s fictional mythology with authentic Egyptian lore, and the combination lent greater credibility to Bloch’s horrors. Bloch also developed the fiendish character of Nyarlathotep, the shadowed messenger of the Old Ones originally created by H. P. Lovecraft.
After the death of H. P. Lovecraft, Bloch and most of his colleagues stopped writing Cthulhu Mythos stories, and the series fell into a slump until it was revived by August Derleth during the 50s and continued by a new generation of writers in the 60s and 70s. As Bloch said later, “working in the Mythos was a sort of playful game—at least while Lovecraft was alive to appreciate it; once Lovecraft was no longer there, it became more solemn and less fun…the sense of play was gone.” 1
It wasn’t until 1948 that Bloch returned to the Cthulhu Mythos, and this time it was with an ambiguous entry into the series entitled “The Unspeakable Betrothal.” During the 40s, Bloch had come under the influence of the style of Raymond Chandler, particularly in his psychological thrillers, and from this influence Bloch established his own distinctive style, characterized by a hard-hitting yet easy-going and graphically subtle narrative employing deft wordplay. “The Unspeakable Betrothal” (the title was not Bloch’s but an editor’s heavy-handed “improvement”) is a moody fantasy of a lonely young girl whose exotic dreams draw her to forsake reality for the dream-world of Yuggoth, home of the Old Ones. The tale benefitted from Bloch’s literary maturity—indeed, Bloch now looks back on many of his earlier Lovecraftian stories with regret, asking, “Why couldn’t some of those ideas have waited to occur to me later, when I’d been better prepared to do justice to them?”2
“Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” written at the request of an editor who had a cover illustration and wanted Bloch to write a story around it, was another evocative Mythos story, this time adopting the first-person narrative of a young backwoods boy whose simplistic dialect made the horror of tromping shoggoths and oozing, subterranean monstrosities vividly real. Another story written around an editor’s cover illustration, “Terror at Cut-throat Cove” was a remarkable novelette, containing a pirate vignette in flashback, which depicted the actual manifestation of one of the Old Ones. There is no last-minute rescue here—Bloch dooms all of mankind in one fell swoop as his hero succumbs at the end to the ancient Being.
Even more apocalyptic was his 1979 novel, Strange Eons. “For many years I’ve had repeated requests from Lovecraft fans who wanted a [new] Cthulhu Mythos story from me,” Bloch said of the origins of Stange Eons. “Having written my early work in conscious emulation of his style and having read so many pastiches by Derleth and others, I felt no desire to add yet another imitation to the list—so in order to oblige it was necessary to come up with something slightly different. Casting about for a solution, I hit upon the plot for this novel which would allow me to employ several different styles and include an element of tongue-in-cheek which in no way negated the homage. 3
The novel’s various protagonists gradually discover that the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft was in actuality penned as a warning of horror that Lovecraft knew to be frightfully real. The characters use HPL’s stories as guidebooks in their attempts to thwart a murderous cult from freeing Great Cthulhu from his watery resting place. Like “Terror in Cut-throat Cove,” Strange Eons culminates in apocalyptic doom for planet Earth; both stories are remarkable examples of Bloch dealing with themes he employed during his Weird Tales apprenticeship, yet from a contemporary literary perspective.
Most of Robert Bloch’s writing, although illuminating the ugliness that can exist within the human psyche or the unknown terrors beyond our horizon, is dominantly optimistic—in the end, the forces of good generally prevail. Not so in his efforts in the Cthulhu Mythos. From “The Shambler from the Stars” through Strange Eons, Bloch nowhere gives us any reassurance to cling to amidst the chaos of cosmic doom—these stories are completely barren of hope. Bloch has effectively adopted Lovecraft’s hopeless existentialism for these stories, and his contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos are perhaps truer emulations of Lovecraft’s intention than those of his colleagues. “Most writers in the field of weird fiction see an interplay between darkness and light, sickness and health, death and life,” wrote one reviewer about Strange Eons. “But for Bloch as for Lovecraft, all roads lead to Hell. Thus Bloch is better equipped than most to portray the pessimistic Lovecraftian experience of a journey into the entropic vortex in which there is no ‘sane’ point of reference.” 4
NOTES
1 Robert Bloch, quoted by Lin Carter, Lovecraft, A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 159.
2 Robert Bloch, “Afterword,” Mysteries of the Worm (New York: Zebra Books, 1981), p. 331.
3 Robert Bloch, interviewed by Graeme Flanagan, Robert Bloch: A Bio-Bibliography (Canberra, Australia, 1979), p. 36.
4 Joel Lane, “Strange Eons and the Cthulhu Mythos,” Dark Horizons #24 (UK, Winter 1981), p. 8.
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.
It’s not an unlikely habitat for Bloch either. Fifty years ago he started out writing weird horror stories in the vein of his literary mentor, H. P. Lovecraft in the evocative pages of Weird Tales magazine. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Bloch experimented with a variety of styles until becoming established later in the 1940s as the master of psychological horror—that moody brand of terror that emanates, unlike Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial horrors, from within, emerging in the guise of everyday persons and events. While supernatural fantasy would make its appearance from time to time, Bloch’s personal interest and literary development found a home in the internal terrors of the abnormal psyche.
During the 1930s, however, Bloch’s work was very much in the supernatural vein of H. P. Lovecraft: both his style and theme were consciously modeled after that of his mentor. When Lovecraft’s weird fantasies began to sketch the outline of a common mythology, Bloch joined with other members of the “Lovecraft Circle”—Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner and others—to try his own hand at contributing to the myth-cycle.
The Cthulhu Mythos, as it is now known, both bespoke Lovecraft’s personal existentialist philosophy and provided some of the finest dark fantasy of the period. Bloch’s contributions, while in many cases overt imitations of Lovecraft, helped develop the Mythos by expanding its fictional library of occult books and evil creatures and eventually contributed their own brand of terror and style to the Mythos.
Bloch’s first sale to Weird Tales, “The Secret in the Tomb,” (which was kept back and published after a second, and far superior tale, “The Feast in the Abbey”), was not actually a Cthulhu Mythos story, but it did introduce Mysteries of the Worm, a legendary tome written, according to the story, by a Flemish wizard named Ludvig Prinn. Bloch used the device, as did Lovecraft and his fellow-writers, to provide and develop a realistic framework for his fictional mythology. He also referred to Lovecraft’s creation, the Necronomicon and his own Cultes des Goules, but did little more than mention these tomes in the midst of an otherwise ordinary horror story about a man who discovers his ancestor is a ghoul. Bloch’s “The Suicide in the Study” also mentioned Mysteries of the Worm as well as the Black Rites “by the mad Luveh-Keraph” (an in-joke on Lovecraft’s name, one of many perpetrated on each other by members of the Lovecraft Circle), but did little to develop Mythos themes.
“The Shambler from the Stars,” was really Bloch’s first bona fide Cthulhu Mythos story and was the beginning of one of the most remarkable trilogies in weird fiction. Bloch expanded the history of Ludvig Prinn and his eldritch volume, here referred to by its Latin title De Vermis Mysteriis, which Lovecraft had provided for him. Bloch also received permission to use Lovecraft as a character in the story, annihilating him in a particularly gruesome manner. Lovecraft returned the favor in his famous story “The Haunter in the Dark,” in which a young writer named Robert “Blake” suffers a horrible fate after seeking answers to things best left unknown. Years later, Bloch completed the trilogy with “The Shadow from the Steeple,” which followed up events from the previous story and demonstrated Bloch’s own remarkable literary growth—while the style is intentionally Lovecraftian, it is not dependently so, as his earlier works had been. “Shadow” also demonstrated the remarkable subtlety that Bloch had been employing in his work, especially in the story’s brooding denouement, which leaves the reader cold with a lasting chill, rather than simply titillating him with a short-lived shock.
Bloch’s early Mythos stories tended to be cast in the same mold, written according to a formula that ended in an often contrived, but deliciously conveyed, shock ending. “The Grinning Ghoul” and “The Dark Demon” are memorable in this vein as are Bloch’s Mythos stories involving Egyptian mythology. “The Faceless God” and “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” effectively correlated Lovecraft’s fictional mythology with authentic Egyptian lore, and the combination lent greater credibility to Bloch’s horrors. Bloch also developed the fiendish character of Nyarlathotep, the shadowed messenger of the Old Ones originally created by H. P. Lovecraft.
After the death of H. P. Lovecraft, Bloch and most of his colleagues stopped writing Cthulhu Mythos stories, and the series fell into a slump until it was revived by August Derleth during the 50s and continued by a new generation of writers in the 60s and 70s. As Bloch said later, “working in the Mythos was a sort of playful game—at least while Lovecraft was alive to appreciate it; once Lovecraft was no longer there, it became more solemn and less fun…the sense of play was gone.” 1
It wasn’t until 1948 that Bloch returned to the Cthulhu Mythos, and this time it was with an ambiguous entry into the series entitled “The Unspeakable Betrothal.” During the 40s, Bloch had come under the influence of the style of Raymond Chandler, particularly in his psychological thrillers, and from this influence Bloch established his own distinctive style, characterized by a hard-hitting yet easy-going and graphically subtle narrative employing deft wordplay. “The Unspeakable Betrothal” (the title was not Bloch’s but an editor’s heavy-handed “improvement”) is a moody fantasy of a lonely young girl whose exotic dreams draw her to forsake reality for the dream-world of Yuggoth, home of the Old Ones. The tale benefitted from Bloch’s literary maturity—indeed, Bloch now looks back on many of his earlier Lovecraftian stories with regret, asking, “Why couldn’t some of those ideas have waited to occur to me later, when I’d been better prepared to do justice to them?”2
“Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” written at the request of an editor who had a cover illustration and wanted Bloch to write a story around it, was another evocative Mythos story, this time adopting the first-person narrative of a young backwoods boy whose simplistic dialect made the horror of tromping shoggoths and oozing, subterranean monstrosities vividly real. Another story written around an editor’s cover illustration, “Terror at Cut-throat Cove” was a remarkable novelette, containing a pirate vignette in flashback, which depicted the actual manifestation of one of the Old Ones. There is no last-minute rescue here—Bloch dooms all of mankind in one fell swoop as his hero succumbs at the end to the ancient Being.
Even more apocalyptic was his 1979 novel, Strange Eons. “For many years I’ve had repeated requests from Lovecraft fans who wanted a [new] Cthulhu Mythos story from me,” Bloch said of the origins of Stange Eons. “Having written my early work in conscious emulation of his style and having read so many pastiches by Derleth and others, I felt no desire to add yet another imitation to the list—so in order to oblige it was necessary to come up with something slightly different. Casting about for a solution, I hit upon the plot for this novel which would allow me to employ several different styles and include an element of tongue-in-cheek which in no way negated the homage. 3
The novel’s various protagonists gradually discover that the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft was in actuality penned as a warning of horror that Lovecraft knew to be frightfully real. The characters use HPL’s stories as guidebooks in their attempts to thwart a murderous cult from freeing Great Cthulhu from his watery resting place. Like “Terror in Cut-throat Cove,” Strange Eons culminates in apocalyptic doom for planet Earth; both stories are remarkable examples of Bloch dealing with themes he employed during his Weird Tales apprenticeship, yet from a contemporary literary perspective.
Most of Robert Bloch’s writing, although illuminating the ugliness that can exist within the human psyche or the unknown terrors beyond our horizon, is dominantly optimistic—in the end, the forces of good generally prevail. Not so in his efforts in the Cthulhu Mythos. From “The Shambler from the Stars” through Strange Eons, Bloch nowhere gives us any reassurance to cling to amidst the chaos of cosmic doom—these stories are completely barren of hope. Bloch has effectively adopted Lovecraft’s hopeless existentialism for these stories, and his contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos are perhaps truer emulations of Lovecraft’s intention than those of his colleagues. “Most writers in the field of weird fiction see an interplay between darkness and light, sickness and health, death and life,” wrote one reviewer about Strange Eons. “But for Bloch as for Lovecraft, all roads lead to Hell. Thus Bloch is better equipped than most to portray the pessimistic Lovecraftian experience of a journey into the entropic vortex in which there is no ‘sane’ point of reference.” 4
NOTES
1 Robert Bloch, quoted by Lin Carter, Lovecraft, A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 159.
2 Robert Bloch, “Afterword,” Mysteries of the Worm (New York: Zebra Books, 1981), p. 331.
3 Robert Bloch, interviewed by Graeme Flanagan, Robert Bloch: A Bio-Bibliography (Canberra, Australia, 1979), p. 36.
4 Joel Lane, “Strange Eons and the Cthulhu Mythos,” Dark Horizons #24 (UK, Winter 1981), p. 8.
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.