THE OPENER OF THE WAY is a 1946 collection of Robert Bloch short stories (this is the 1970s paperback edition) ranging from the eponymous 1936 story—his first published work—through “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” from 1943. It’s interesting on several levels. (EDIT: It wasn’t his first. I’ll get to the first in the next Bloch book I read in a few weeks).
First off, most of the stories are entertaining (like a lot of anthologies, they’re not all gems). The Ripper story is a classic of horror, “The Cloak” is a slightly humorous story of vampirism and even Bloch’s first story is readable, albeit heavily soaked in Lovecraftian prose (Bloch was one of Lovecraft’s many proteges and the influence shows). Aside from that, the stretch of the stories over seven years shows Bloch developing his own style fairly fast—”The Cloak” came out in 1939 but his style is much more polished (there’s as yet no sign of the farcical humor or cynical polemics that appear in later work, though).
Two aspects of the stories work less well. First, there’s the old Lovecraftian cliché of something that has a vaguely, indefinably horrible air about it but for no real reason (as in Bloch’s “Seal of the Satyr” here). Rather like having an air about him, it’s cheap, asserting a feeling without justifying it. Lovecraft could make it work (most of the time, anyway), but few other people can.
Second, there’s the climactic ending reveal, as in “The Dark Demon.” A Lovecraft-esque writer reveals that his eerie stories are actually based on dream visits to other planes, and his fear that a monstrous demon is about to possess his body. Narrator scoffs, but at the end he realizes—the demon has taken over the man’s body! It’s all true! Aaaagh!
Stories leading up to an ending or climactic shock are hard to bring off. As Fritz Leiber once wrote, it’s hard because everything else (characterization, plot logic) becomes subordinate to setting up the big reveal. It’s even harder to do with an It’s All True ending because it’s never really a surprise: Did anyone reading “The Dark Demon,” even when it was fresh, anticipate an ending where the narrator was right and the writer was crazy?
It doesn’t help that this is another Lovecraftian attempt trying to impress us with visions of cosmic horrors. Bloch couldn’t do that stuff as well as HPL, though he did work some good variations on Lovecraft in his other HPL-influenced story (I’m starting a reread of my Bloch collections, so I’ll get to those eventually)
Tag Archives: Robert Bloch
The Opener of the Way
And more books
I’m not sure a writer as associated with horror as Psycho-scripter Robert Bloch could get away with publishing a low-brow comedy such as IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND these days. The plot involves a mechanical tool for psychoanalysis causing a nerdy collegian to manifest his inner conflicts such as sex drive (he can teleport women’s clothes off), primal instincts (he becomes an ape) and the death urge (vampirism!). Fun, though hardly P.G. Wodehouse.
THE BATMAN CHRONICLES Volume Nine runs through the spring and summer of 1943. During this period, we get a couple of so-so Joker stories, a fair Penguin story, some topical tales (a battle against pirates preying on fishing boats emphasizes that fish provide vitamins our soldiers need to stay strong!) and two notable debut. One is Crime Doctor Matthew Thorne, a surgeon and criminal thrill-junkie (easily the best of several Moriarty-like crime planners they used in the early 1940s) and the other, Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s new butler and amateur detective. If not the best of Batman, this is still a fun era.
THE FOREVER PEOPLE trade paperback collects the weakest of Jack Kirby’s “fourth world” series from the early 1970s, the story of a quirky band of “hippies” from New Genesis (I wondered at first why everyone saw their super-hero style outfits as hippie chic, then I remembered that to have shoulder-length male hair in that era screamed “counter culture”) battling Darkseid’s schemes to get the Anti-Life Equation and reduce all living things to slaves (this series spelled out explicitly that life is making choices and exercising free will; if you lose or give that up, you become part of Anti-Life). The first eight issues strike me as an arc to that effect (culminating in Darkseid’s near success), followed, unfortunately, by two issues attempting (at DC’s insistence) to reboot the super-hero Deadman (didn’t work for either Deadman or the Forever People) and then a final issue. Even the opening arc is weaker than Mr. Miracle or New Gods, without their more focused narrative (we get a whole issue of time travel that comes off as pure filler). And why would inhabitants of New Genesis recognize Abe Lincoln or read 1984?
I will, however, give Kirby credit for having young free spirits as his protagonists: For most comics creators of his generation, youth culture (and hippies, and leftists) was something to wag fingers over, not celebrate. Not to mention that Kirby’s energy can infuse even a battle with Mantis (Spider-Man’s foe Electro with delusions of grandeur) and make it feel larger than life.
