Robert Bloch

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Robert Albert Bloch (April 5 1917, Chicago, Illinois-September 23 1994, Los Angeles) was a prolific Jewish-American writer.

Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels, usually crime fiction, science fiction, and, perhaps most influentially, horror fiction. He was a contributor to pulp magazines like Weird Tales in his early career, and was also a prolific screenwriter. He was the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Robert Bloch was also a major contributor to science fiction fanzines and fandom in general. In the 1940s, he created the humorous character Lefty Feep in a story for Fantastic Adventures. He also worked for a time in vaudeville.

1 The Cthulhu Mythos
2 Politics
3 Psycho and screenwriting
4 Writings on Bloch
5 Books and Media
6 External resources

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The Cthulhu Mythos

He was a friend and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, and was the author of a number of stories that were set in, and which extended, the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. He invented, for example, the oft-cited Mythos tomes De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules.

Bloch even appears, thinly disguised, as the character "Robert Blake" in Lovecraft's story "The Haunter of the Dark", which is dedicated to Bloch. In this story, Lovecraft kills the Bloch character off, repaying a courtesy Bloch started with his tale "The Shambler from the Stars", in which the Lovecraft-inspired figure dies. Bloch later wrote a third tale, "The Shadow From the Steeple", picking up where The Haunter of the Dark finished.

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Politics

In 1939, Bloch was contacted by James Doolittle, who was managing the campaign for a little-known assistant attorney in Milwaukee, Wisconsin named Carl Zeidler. He was asked to work on his speechwriting, advertising, and photo ops, in collaboration with Harold Gauer. They created elaborate campaign shows; in Bloch's 1993 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, he gives an inside account of the campaign, and the innovations he and Gauer came up with — for instance, the original releasing-balloons-from-the-ceiling shtick. He comments bitterly on how, after Zeidler's victory, they were ignored and not even paid their promised salaries. He ends the story with a wryly philosophical point:

If Carl Zeidler had not asked Jim Doolittle to manage his campaign, Doolittle would never have contacted me about it. And the only reason Doolittle knew me to begin with was because he read my yarn ("The Cloak") in Unknown.

Rattling this chain of circumstances, one may stretch it a bit further. If I had not written a little vampire story called "The Cloak", Carl Zeidler might never have become mayor of Milwaukee.

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Psycho and screenwriting

Bloch became most famous as the author of the novel Psycho, which was adapted quite faithfully by Joseph Stefano into the film of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. His best-known work as a screenwriter is probably The Night Walker (1964), which he wrote for William Castle, although he also penned several scripts for the original series of Star Trek; he seemed happiest, among his television work, with his contributions to the Boris Karloff-hosted series Thriller.

Bloch also contributed to Harlan Ellison's science fiction anthology, Dangerous Visions. His story, "A Toy for Juliette", evoked both the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper. In fact, Ellison's own contribution to the anthology was a direct follow-up of Bloch's, and was titled "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World".

Robert Bloch died in 1994 and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Aside from his immense output, Bloch left a reputation among fellow writers for his kindness, generosity and laughably atrocious puns.

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Writings on Bloch

There is an essay on his work, with particular reference to the novels Psycho and The Scarf, in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001). Joshi examines Bloch's literary relationship with Lovecraft in a further essay in The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004).

In addition, Randall D. Larson has authored three reference books about Robert Bloch: The Robert Bloch Reader's Guide (1986, a literary analysis of Bloch's entire output through 1986), The Complete Robert Bloch (1986, an illustrated bibliography of Bloch's writing), and The Robert Bloch Companion (1986, collected interviews).

A compilation of Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos fiction, titled Mysteries of the Worm, was published by Chaosium with commentary by Robert M. Price.

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