Night-World by Robert Bloch

"I can feel his eyes.  Like knives stabbing.  He's crazy, you know.  The rest of them, they're just sick, but he's really crazy.  He can look at people and make them do whatever he wants.  That's why Tony helped him.  He even had Dr. Griswold fooled.  He can look at you and tell just what you're thinking.  He burned everything up in the fireplace, but first he found out where all of us lived, so if we got away he could come after us."

Sometimes when I am doing the housework out here in the country, I watch genre movies from the '50s, '60s and '70s on my trusty iphone.  Recently I watched one directed by Freddie Francis called The Psychopath, the story of a young man's unhealthy relationship with his mother and a strange series of murders--alongside each of the dead bodies the bobbies discover a doll with features modelled on the victim's!  Maybe I should have guessed it based on the plot, but it was only later when I looked up the movie online that I realized that the screenplay of The Psychopath was yet another product of the prolific pen of Robert Bloch.  

This discovery reminded me that I had purchased a Bloch novel on the road trip my wife and I took up to Niagara Falls, across Upstate New York, and then down through Vermont and Massachusetts, paying one dollar for a 1986 Tor paperback printing of 1972's Night-World at the same Oneota, NY antique store where I saw a copy of Anatole France's The Well of St. Clare and bought a little edition of A. E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad and a big European Man Ray book.  This edition of Night-World has an abysmal cover illo, just a mass of black hair, a pair of hands and the bare hint of a face crammed into just a third of the cover's acreage.  I guess the good people at Tor were counting on Bloch's name selling this one.  While Tor marketed Bloch's novel under its "Horror" imprint as a "chiller," the first edition was part of Simon and Schuster's Inner Sanctum Mystery series, and its cover suggests the killer commits his foul deeds with a German pistol, not his bare hands.  Well, let's read this short novel (don't let the page count fool you; the print is quite big and there is lots of blank space between the twenty-five chapters--so much blank space you could use this paperback as a diary or journal!) and see precisely what kind of carnage Bloch is serving up this time.

Chapter 1 finds us in a mental institution where we become familiar with the twisted thinking of a patient who has been subjected to shock treatments.  This guy is clever and cunning; he is tricking the medical staff into thinking he is getting better by saying the things they want to hear, doing the things they hope he will do.  He keeps his true feelings, his true character, hidden--he is eager to get out there and kill people, as killing people at close range is, he feels, proof of one's bravery, evidence that one is a member of a natural aristocracy.  In portraying this guy's perversion of ordinary (even banal) talk about freedom and independence, about the need to question authority and the duty to fight injustice, Bloch not only creates a character who is compelling but also satirizes our society.  This sick freak wants to murder people, and says he is doing it in the interest of freedom, in the name of the oppressed--is this not a hint that people who aren't obviously deranged, say politicians and political activists, who declare they are working to preserve freedom or to liberate the marginalized are perhaps saying so merely as a strategy in their pursuit of selfish goals like power, fame or fortune, as a cover and rationalization of their own selfish quest to satisfy their psychological needs?  Anyway, this chapter, though not unmarred by Bloch's distracting jokes and wordplay, is a good start to the novel with its driven protagonist/antagonist and its broad-based but not overly obtrusive social criticism.

Bloch was born in Chicago but he is sort of a creature of Hollywood, and much of his work I have read is set in La La Land and/or stuffed with references to old movies and old pop culture in general, and Night-World follows this pattern.  Real life comedian Jimmy Savo is mentioned in Chapter 1, and in Chapter 2 we meet Karen, who works at an L.A. ad agency, giving Bloch a chance to depict Tinseltown as the home of smog, loose sexual mores and drug use; later in the novel there is reference to ghettos, crime, the constant threat of riot.  The shock ending of Chapter 2 comes when Karen gets a phone call and it is revealed that her husband Bruce has been in the private sanitarium of a Dr. Griswold for six months and Griswold is considering releasing him!

Karen is eager to be with her husband again, and rushes to the remote location of Griswold's establishment to discuss the possibility of finally seeing Bruce for the first time in half a year.  But when she gets there five of the six patients have vanished, and the sixth, as well as the medical staff, have been massacred!  Griswold has been electrocuted with his own shock therapy set up! 

Karen calls the cops, and she being the closest thing they have to a witness, they interrogate her with vigor and even want to confine her to the station for her own protection.  She insists on sleeping at home and going to work, but the police only let her go after she agrees to letting a detective accompany her everywhere as her bodyguard.  Afraid of implicating her husband, Karen is pretty cagey with the fuzz, telling them as little as possible about the condition that lead to Bruce admitting himself to the loony bin and even hiding from them evidence that Bruce--or somebody--has broken into their apartment in her absence.  Bloch offers us no clarity on whether or not Bruce is the killer, and whether or not he is the guy in Chapter 1, keeping us in the dark almost as deeply as Karen is keeping the boys in blue.    

In Chapter 7 the scene switches to the home of one of the surviving sanitarium staff, a nurse who wasn't scheduled to work at the time of the massacre.  She laments how expensive things are nowadays, how the government is always up in your business, how the sexual revolution has led to men taking advantage of women like her, how all the TV shows suck.  (Add Night-World to your Seventies Malaise Reading List.)  Then the murderer shows up and all her problems are over.

We meet three of the patients who have escaped the sanitarium, one by one.  First, a crooked real estate guy who admitted himself to the booby hatch to deal with his alcoholism.  Second, a young woman who suffers neuroses because her parents were overly protective.  And third, the rock musician Tony; Bloch shows the moral vacuity--or moral depravity--of the counter culture of sex, drugs and rock and roll by having Tony (as we can see in the quote from neuroses girl with which I opened this blog post) act as the murderer's assistant--the other patients were browbeaten by the murderer into obedience, but Tony went along with his monstrous crimes.  The killer catches up to and kills all three of these people in the middle section of the novel.  (He employs a variety of methods, and scenes of strangulation legitimize the cover of my copy, but there is no specific reference to a Luger or Walther P-38, so that first edition cover is pretty questionable.)  

But who is this killer who loves freedom, denounces authority, considers ordinary Americans to be obedient sheep, has read Clausewitz and Freud and the Bible?  Is it Bruce or the other surviving patient?  Bloch keeps us wondering until quite near the end with all kinds of hints that Bruce is a strange and dangerous character.

I recall having lots of elaborate complaints about Bloch's novels Lori and The Scarf, but I have to say Night-World is pretty good and lacks any glaring deficiencies that I might expound upon.  My biggest complaint is that I didn't find the way the murderer was killed in the end very convincing; my second biggest complaint is that Bloch spends too much time describing the real estate guy's scam.  Otherwise Bloch maintains good proportions, not overdoing the wordplay or the social criticism or the psychobabble aspects as I feel he often does.  The style and pacing here in Night-World are also well handled.  Better than average for Bloch--I can confidently give Night-World a thumbs up!