Robert Bloch: "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster," "Luck is No Lady" and "The Tempter"

We've been looking at a lot of 1958 magazines as we read stories published that year which Judith Merril thought noteworthy.  When we sought Charles E. Fritch's "Big, Wide, Wonderful World" in the March 1958 issue of F&SF, we stumbled upon a reprint in that issue of a Robert Bloch story from 1957.  Let's spend our valuable time today reading "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" and two other 1957 stories by the creator of Norman Bates--you can fold that laundry and wash those dishes tomorrow.

"How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster"

"How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" first appeared in the men's magazine Caper; I'll be reading it from the aforementioned 1958 issue of F&SF.  

This is a joke story full of lame puns (news flashes come from "The Dissociated Press") and topical jokes, including multiple derisive references to Elvis Presley, whose looks and singing voice Bloch apparently had little liking for.  As we expect with Bloch, one of the themes of the story is psychology, and one of the absurdist jokes is a therapist named Subconscious Sigmund who carries around a "portable couch" so he can offer "curb-service."

Our narrator is in a bar along with Subconscious Sigmund and a "pretty chick" named Estrellita Shapiro.  On the radio they here that a flying saucer has landed in Central Park, which is just two blocks away!  The nine-foot-tall tentacled monster that disembarks from the craft brushes aside the mayor's welcoming committee and proves immune to the fire of the police officers' guns.  Subconscious Sigmund runs out to try to provide therapy to the alien and thus calm it down, but is also ignored--he returns disheveled to the bar to say that the alien is knocking over buildings in an obvious search for something.  The creature busts into the bar.  The quick-thinking bar tender offers the monster money.  When he is ignored, he offers it booze.  Ignored again, he offers it Estrellita Shapiro.  When the monster shows no interest in her either, the barkeep realizes what a traveler on a long journey must really need, and leads the extra terrestrial to the bathroom, and peace is made between Terran and alien.

I actually laughed at the portable couch gag and some of the other jokes, so I will rate this story acceptable filler.   

"How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" also appeared in the French (1958) and Japanese (1960) editions of F&SF; you have to wonder if the joke title worked at all in Japanese, if How Green Was My Valley was famous over there and if the title they used for the Bloch story similarly mirrored the local translation of the title of the 1939 British novel about Welsh miners and its 1941 American film adaptation.  (The French just renamed the story "My Barman and His Monster.")   In 1985, "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" was included in a French Bloch collection and in 2005 an American one. 

"Luck is No Lady" 

This one made its initial appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and would be reprinted in 1979 in Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Send Chills Down Your Spine.  It has also been reprinted in various Bloch collections including where I am reading it, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of, a 1979 paperback with a pretty terrible cover (I took exception to Del Rey/Ballantine's unbelievably weak Horror logo back in 2022 when I first laid disbelieving eyes on Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of.)  

Frankie had work as a coremaker months or years ago, but nowadays he is a drunk, a bum, who spends his time hanging out on a park bench or in a bar.  A regular they call the Professor is at the bar today, talking about how he lost his job on the faculty due to bad luck, and blabs on and on about Tyche AKA Fortuna, the goddess of luck, about how our lives are ruled by fickle Fate.

Frankie has been so drunk lately he hasn't even been thinking of women, but today a woman walks in the bar who is so hot he can't help but follow her.  This black-haired, black-eyed statuesque figure in a red dress goes to the back room where the roulette tables and crap tables are.  She doesn't talk, and the other men in the bar don't seem to notice her, but by her gestures she indicates to Frankie how he can win three thousand bucks at the roulette table.  When she leaves, the now wealthy Frankie follows her; out on the street she again she directs him without uttering a word, and he ends up foiling a robbery and securing a job at a foundry.

Frankie's good luck does not last, perhaps because he starts pursuing a blonde woman, arousing the jealousy of Fortuna, perhaps because (as has been kept from the reader) his genuine character is that of an anti-social man of violence.  The story ends back in the bar, and just before the police arrive to arrest Frankie for murdering that blonde, Frankie sees the Professor talking to somebody who isn't there--no doubt Fortuna has found a new beneficiary...or is it victim?

I am willing to judge this an acceptable filler story, but it has a problem that is nagging at me, the inconsistency in Frankie's character.  At the very start of the story we are told Frankie has always been a bum, but in the middle of the story we learn Frankie used to have a union job as a skilled laborer, and then that he is an ex-con and at the end of the story we see him assault a woman from behind and drag her by the hair into an alley.  Is this guy a loser, an ordinary guy, or a monster?  It doesn't feel like Bloch is springing cleverly crafted surprises on the reader with these changes, but doing something cheap and lazy, or, even worse, just making mistakes.  Oh, well.  We'll say "Luck is No Lady" is on the low end of acceptable.

"The Tempter" 

 

Here we have a Robert Bloch deep cut, a story never reprinted in English (as far as isfdb knows.)  "The Tempter" appeared in a copy of Satellite with a fun, bright and sharp realistic space program cover by Alex Schomburg, and resurfaced in 1976 in the Netherlands in a horror anthology.

Our protagonist is a corrupt psychoanalyst who not only makes money stringing along his patients and not really curing them but by owning apartment buildings.  This joker smokes cigars and wears a goatee so he looks as much like Freud as possible.  In the evenings he goes to a brothel.

A new patient arrives, a guy named John Smith who claims the Devil is trying to take over his body!  At night he has dreams of Hell, and is growing increasingly comfortable--at home!--in the fiery furnace.  Obviously the shrink doesn't believe in the supernatural, and thinks this guy is just nuts.  A member of the working class, John Smith doesn't have enough money to make treating him worthwhile, but the analyst decides to see him three or four times a week anyway, thinking Smith an odd enough specimen that he could write lectures around his case.

A month and a half later, John Smith is claiming he is the Devil, that he has taken over the Smith body.  When the shrink asks why, if he is the Devil, he keeps coming to therapy, Smith/Satan says it is because he is trying to tempt the shrink to such evil behavior that he will end up in Hell.  Is all of this Devil jazz true?  Can the Devil really tempt the protagonist into committing a sin that will condemn him to eternal punishment?     

This is a better than average Devil story because it takes Hell and sin seriously.  I also like the story's attack on psychoanalysis and its practitioners.  Most importantly, the story is also a smooth read, the right length and pace, never boring you with unnecessary info or repetitive scenes.  "The Tempter" is the best of today's stories.

**********

I am often disappointed in Bloch, but all three of today's stories work, so bravo to him.  Maybe we'll hang around with Bloch some more.