"The Pin" (1953)
I feel like I have seen all the central gimmicks in this story before in other fiction (like Ray Bradbury's "The Scythe" and the various filmed versions of Death Takes a Holiday, as well as additional stories whose titles I can't recall) and I was able to predict what would happen, and thus reading "The Pin" felt like a waste of my time and really rubbed me the wrong way.
A starving artist looking for studio space in New York City is directed by a rental agent to a cheap room in a building which he suggests is essentially abandoned. When the artist gets to the top floor room he sees, without himself being seen, a man surrounded by big piles of books and scrolls and sheets of paper wielding a large silver pin, stabbing these books and other documents apparently at random, his movements characterized by a sort of anguish.
The artist over several pages figures out the thing we readers realized immediately--this guy is "selecting" who must die every day. The artist steals the pin and people stop dying, to the amazement of the authorities. But the pin drives the artist to return to the abandoned building, where he is compelled to take up the task of picking out who will die each day.
The gimmicks are not fresh, and the thing is vulnerable to endless nitpicking to the point that it makes no sense (how do the lists of people get there?; the lists are phone books and government records, so don't include infants or people in primitive tribes, but we know such people die; do the real estate agent and building owner know that the grim reaper is in their building?; people don't really die at random-- old people and people who take risks are more likely to die; and on and on) and because it is set in the realistic here and now of New York City in which people pay rent and the guy pricking the lists has to leave the building to eat lunch, it doesn't feel like an allegory, like if an explorer in a desert found a skeleton doing this via crystal ball in a castle. As for the style, while Bloch spares us puns, we do have to endure one of his other characteristic crutches, the list, here lists of cities, lists of record books, and lists of people who have been mortally wounded but can't die.
Thumbs down.
After debuting in Amazing, "The Pin" was reprinted thirteen years later in an issue of Fantastic that appears to consist entirely of reprints, in 1995's Amazing: The Anthology, and in a bunch of other places. I guess people like it.
Bromley is a PR man working in show biz. But he has a problem--he is losing his identity, his individuality, he not only speaks in cliches and old song lyrics and slang, he thinks in them, and only them, unable to come up with anything original, anything of substance. He goes to see a shrink, Dr. Fell (my educated readers will of course know that "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell" is the first line of a famous loose translation of one of Martial's epigrams), and after several visits comes to an astonishing conclusion--there is no Dr. Fell, he is merely a hallucination Bromley has involuntarily concocted himself after studying psychiatry books at the library! Bromley struggles to resurrect his native personality, but instead the Dr. Fell personality takes over and Bromley comes to think of himself as this fictional character devised by his subconcious!
This story has a level of social commentary to it, Bloch attacking show biz for being fundamentally artificial and full of conformist phonies, and suggesting that the problem of conformism and minds full of pop culture mush is spreading throughout society--the Fell persona tells Bromley that he is only the first of a new form of maniac whose ranks will soon outnumber those of the paranoids and schizoids. I think we might also see in this story a reflection of Bloch's own anxieties as a professional writer who had to churn out copy to make ends meet--maybe Bloch feared his own works--and his own thoughts!--lacked originality, were just a rehash of old concepts, and if we look at Bloch's body of work we do see that he often bases stories on real life figures like Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden or on other works of literature like Alice in Wonderland.
Moderately good.
"The Big Kick" (1959)
Judy is a shallow girl who uses her beauty to get men to give her nice things, but she doesn't want to marry and have kids and she finds most men's "pawing" and "slobbering" disgusting. Then she meets Mitch the beatnik musician who almost never gets any gigs and spends most of his time hanging around with his equally unemployed friends, getting drunk or "blowing" pot. Mitch takes Judy "with casual brutality," which she appreciates, and she joins the beatnik crew.
The beatnik gang's lifestyle is more or less financed by a square named Kenny, a rich guy who abandoned his job as a college professor and now hangs around with the beatniks, but is held in contempt by them--they only let him spend time with them because he buys their booze and pays to have their cars repaired and so on. Mitch is a sort of amateur psychology expert, and tells Judy that Kenny is a masochist and she can squeeze money out of the guy by teasing him, going on dates with him and never putting out.
The twist ending is that Kenny is not a sappy loser masochist but a clever sadist who has been playing the long game, knowing that the beatniks, who travel hither and yon and have no real friends or connections, are easy prey. He tricks Mitch into getting arrested and then has Judy under his power--at first Judy thinks Kenny wants to have sex with her, but Kenny explains that he isn't interested in that sort of thing and whips out his knife. What Kenny actually does to Judy--does he just kill her or torture her over some brief or lengthy period before finishing her off?--is left to our imaginations.
Bloch's analysis of the beats and similar counterculture groups (Kenny says "Thirty years ago people like your friend Mitch called themselves The Lost Generation....Twenty years ago they pretended to be communists, ten years ago existentialists") as talentless phonies who profess to be downtrodden artists "as an excuse to justify freeloading as a way of life" is sort of interesting. Kenny, I suppose speaking for Bloch, claims that the "real creative talents" associated with such groups don't stay with them long, but move on and develop the discipline required to produce worthwhile art.
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| As I recently learned, EQMM came out with two covers for each issue, a sex and violence cover for the newsstand, and a staid cover that subscribers would find in their mailboxes |
"Sock Finish" (1957)
More Hollywood, more cultural criticism, this time Bloch arguing that silent films were more sophisticated than the current talkies, that audiences today are stupid and Hollyweird panders to them. Whether you sympathize with this critique or not, "Sock Finish" is a good story which actually has a character and his tragedy at its center, a character whose black fate pulls the heart strings a little. Thumbs up!
Our narrator is a Hollywood agent. One of the big studios is putting out a period picture, one set in the late Twenties, a romance about two silent film stars; it is to be a vehicle for a beautiful blonde with a 39-inch bust. Because of the film's period and setting, the studio wants a silent film star, Artie Ames, a talented performer who is still in good health and actually performing to plaudits in small fora in Southern Europe, to have a bit part in the film. Our narrator represents Ames and we get to see what a talent, what a hard worker, what a great guy Ames is. Bloch does a good job making Ames sympathetic and likable.
To garner attention, the studio's PR fills the press with stories suggesting Artie Ames has a big part in the film and Ames starts thinking he is going to make a big comeback. The sexalicious blonde even dates Ames and hints that she may marry the man even though he is like thirty years her senior!
But when the film is almost over comes the crushing truth. (Lots of these Bloch stories highlight the duplicitous work of PR guys, and we have also seen quite a few conniving manipulative women.) The studio is using almost none of the footage Ames so skillfully developed and performed in for them, because today's audiences can't appreciate the sophisticated comedy of the silent screen of which Ames is the only living master. Instead, they are using tiny tidbits and in post production have made Ames look absurd, because the people of the late Fifties think the cinema of the late Twenties is ridiculous and don't want to laugh with it, but laugh at it. Ames will look like a jackass on screen--there will be no comeback, and no marriage to the hottest chick in the free world.
Bloch does a good job in the suspense department; in the final pages of the story we wonder what is going to happen, what Ames is going to do in response to having all his hopes dashed, to being led on by these Hollywood slime and the gorgeous sex symbol. The final scene, a spectacular murder-suicide, is legitimately surprising and disturbing, and a fitting ending to this collection, which has featured so much violence against women and so much anti-Hollywood sentiment.
"Sock Finish" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I think it is better than most of Bloch's output--no dumb jokes, a dissident point of view that is interesting and sustained, and characters that are legitimately sad and disturbing--but isfdb suggests it has never been anthologized, just been reprinted in Bloch collections. Maybe the denigration of a Marilyn Monroe-like figure, and her brutal murder, turns people off? Well, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are recommending "Sock Finish" to you as an overlooked gem!
**********
If we add up the scores, we can award Blood Runs Cold a net score of three, there being seven good stories and only four bad stories (along with six acceptable stories.) So, rush over to ebay to buy a copy; it looks like a paperback today will set you back like $24.00 and a hardcover between $40.00 and $1,000.00.
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