Robert Bloch was one of H. P. Lovecraft's many correspondents and one of many people who wrote stories set in what has come to be known as "The Cthulhu Mythos," a milieu in which figure alien deities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth, places like Arkham and Yuggoth, and forbidden books like the Necronomicon and Mysteries of the Worm. Mysteries of the Worm is an invention of Bloch's own, which he attributed to a Ludvig Prinn, and Lovecraft, who enjoyed giving his friends nicknames, addressed some of his letters to Bloch "My dear Ludvig" or "Noble & Diabolic Dr. Prinn." Let's read three stories today by Bloch that first appeared in Weird Tales and would all reappear in the several-times-reprinted Bloch collection titled Mysteries of the Worm; all of them mention the Necronomicon and Mysteries of the Worm. I am reading them all in scans of the original 1930s magazines available at the internet archive.
In a March 1935 letter to Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft called "The Suicide in the Study" "excellent." Well, let's hope we can agree!
James Allington is a 20th-century wizard! On his bookshelf are copies of Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon and Ludvig Prinn's Mysteries of the Worm. Allington believes that every person's soul has two components, the good, and the evil, and he has conceived of the crazy idea that by splitting his soul in two along the fault line between them, he can split his own body in two! He figures he will then have the novel experience of controlling two bodies with one mind!
"[T]he greatest experiment man has ever known," as Allington calls it in his diary, has unexpected complications. He hypnotizes himself by looking into the shiny blade of his paper-knife (wikipedia assures me this is a different tool than a mere letter opener) and his body is, as anticipated, divided into two separate physical forms. But his mind stays in one form, a body "less than a quarter his ordinary size!" The other portion of his body, the evil part, towers over him, a hairy ape-like monster over which he has absolutely no control! This creature seizes the paper-knife and buries it in the little man's chest; apparently upon death the bodies are reunited, for those who find Allington and judge his death a suicide find only the single normal body.
Bloch writes this somewhat ridiculous story with enthusiasm and keeps it very short, so it is fun. "Excellent" is too generous, but "The Suicide in the Study" is likable filler.
"The Faceless God" begins with a graphic scene of torture and murder in the Egyptian lair of Dr. Stugatche* as the not-so-good doctor expertly directs his black servants in the gruesome process of getting some information out of an old camel-driver the hard way, and then putting this mangled individual out of his misery. The information? The desert location of a recently uncovered idol thousands of year old!
Bloch fills us in on the career and character of the ruthless and greedy Stugatche, and on the rumors about the idol, and then we are there with Stugatche's expedition as they find the idol, almost entirely buried in the sand. When they realize the idol, which takes the form of a life-sized statue of a sort of sphinxlike monster that lacks facial features, is a representation of Nyarlathotep, the native workers are scared enough to resist Stugatche's orders to dig it up until he forces them to do so at gun point. Every manager has his own unique management style! At night, while Stugatche is sleeping, the rest of the expedition sneaks off with the camels and food after reburying the statue. Hmm, I guess some management styles just don't work so well.
The final third or so of the story follows Stugatche as he tries to cross the desert alone; heat, lack of water, and fear of Nyarlathotep, whom Stugatche didn't believe in at the start of the story, drive him insane.
This is a good bit of Yog-Sothery; I enjoyed the descriptions of the idol and of the legend of Nyarlathotep, and the stuff about being alone in the desert and going bonkers also works. Thumbs up!
"The Faceless God" would reappear in many Bloch collections, and Robert A. W. Lowndes would include it in a 1965 issue of his Magazine of Horror; the cover by Gray Morrow illustrates Bloch's story. In 1987 Gianni Pilo included "The Faceless God" in an Italian anthology of Cthulhu Mythos stories with a Boris Vallejo cover with bestiality overtones; that book also includes C. Hall Thompson's "Spawn of the Green Abyss," which I praised in January of this year.
*According to a note in my copy of Volume 7 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David E, Schultz and S. T. Joshi, some later printings of "The Faceless God" change Stugatche's name to Carnoti.
"The Dark Demon" is narrated by a writer of horror stories who made friends with a more important writer of such tales, Edgar Henquist Gordon, a man whom we are told recently disappeared mysteriously. The story is a sort of history of the two men's relationship and an explanation of the older man's strange disappearance.
Gordon became a mentor to the narrator, and shared him not only writing advice but also various secrets. The big secret is that Gordon's stories are all based on his dreams, in which he lives among aliens in strange cities and landscapes "outside of our own cosmos." The places and beings Gordon sees in his dreams and writes about in his stories echo descriptions in the Necronomicon and The Mysteries of the Worm and other strange old books.
As the years go by, Gordon's stories make fewer and fewer concessions to conventional literary devices like plot, and correspondingly lose popularity. They are written more and more from the point of view of alien creatures and espouse unpopular, alien ideas such as that evil does not exist, that good and evil are merely opinions. The narrator sees less and less of Gordon and their friendship falls into decline, Gordon saying that he has to spend more and more time sleeping and writing, even though his work is now so unpopular he can only get it printed privately.
A serious break in their friendship occurs when Gordon starts telling the narrator that he has had these dreams all his life because he is truly in contact with an alien deity; in fact, Gordon is that deity's Messiah on Earth. The alien god instructed Gordon to write and publish stories about life on other worlds in an effort to build up on Earth a cult that will welcome the alien's rule. The narrator thinks poor Gordon has gone insane. One stormy night, the narrator decides to go to Gordon's house and force him to see a doctor (nowadays we'd call this an intervention.) Something, the narrator doesn't know what, inspires the narrator to bring a pistol with him. At Gordon's house the narrator sees a figure sleeping on a couch in the dark--a lightning flash reveals that it is not Gordon, but a monster in Gordon's clothes, a monster that fits the description of the alien deity! The monster has crossed into our universe by using Gordon's body as a gateway or conduit or something!
The narrator shoots at the form, seizes Gordon's most recent writings and flees home to burn them without reading them. When the police finally investigate Gordon's disappearance they don't find his body on that couch, just his clothes.
This story is acceptable, but no big deal; we kind of know what is going on and what will happen the whole time, and the characters Gordon and the narrator are not as exciting as the stars of the other stories we looked at today, Stugache and Allington. The most interesting thing about "The Dark Demon" is perhaps how the relationship of Gordon and the narrator seems to be based on the relationships Lovecraft cultivated with Bloch and other young writers. "The Dark Demon" also gives air to (without actually embodying) some of Lovecraft's theories about literature--his contempt for plot and his assertion that a truly weird story has to be written from an unconventional, or alien, point of view.
Though it has been collected many times, including in a French collection for which it is the title story, "The Dark Demon" has never been anthologized.
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Robert Bloch, as we all know, would go on to great success writing horror stories that focus on abnormal psychology and satirical attacks on American society, especially Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and stories full of little jokes and puns. I think I enjoy these early Lovecraftian stories more, however. Partly this is a reflection of my own tastes and psychology, but I also think that psychological theories and pop culture criticism are ephemeral and specific, and lose power as the theories are exploded and old movies and TV programs are forgotten, while the Lovecraftian themes of alienation and deracination, the fear that life is meaningless and we are ultimately alone and at the mercy of inexplicable forces, are eternal and general.
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