Robert Bloch: "Where the Buffalo Roam," "Is Betsy Blake Still Alive?," "Final Performance," "All on a Golden Afternoon," and "The Gloating Place"

British editions of Blood Runs Cold

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Robert Bloch's 1961 collection Blood Runs Cold, which Anthony Boucher, important writer and editor of SF and detective fiction, called "Outstanding" in The New York Times--that's the paper of record, so you know it has got to be true!  I own the 1963 Popular Library paperback with a green photographic cover and a goofy joke biography of Bloch facing the title page.

In the first installment of our journey through Blood Runs Cold we read five tales, and we've got five more today in round two, five stories which first appeared in magazines in the period 1955-1960.

"Where the Buffalo Roam" (1955)

"Where the Buffalo Roam" was a cover story for Other Worlds Science Stories, a magazine edited by Raymond Palmer and Bea Mahaffey.  (Remember when we read Palmer's fanciful 1945 satire King of the Dinosaurs?  Now there was a painful experience!)  The editorial introduction to "Where the Buffalo Roam" in Other Worlds warns us that Bloch's tale is a specimen of two sub-genres that have been subject to widespread critical disparagement, the "transplanted western" and the "after the atomic war story," but Palmer and/or Mahaffey assures us that Bloch will make editors and readers sick of such stories reconsider their "harsh words."  Let's hope so!  

The narrator of "Where the Buffalo Roam" is an illiterate ignoramus, a white man who lives in a teepee and hunts buffalo with rifles and ammo he gets from nomadic traders who explore ruined cities.  Sometimes he shacks up with a "squaw;" the fact that he uses the term "squaw" for a white woman is one of multiple indications that the narrator is living an idealized version of the lifestyle supposedly enjoyed by the people of the North American continent before the arrival of Europeans.

He has two friends smarter than he, an "Indian" ("Native American" to you!) and a white man named "Doc."  The dialogue of the Indian and Doc, who read books found in the cities, makes clear that two or three generations ago an atomic war destroyed the cities and killed most of the human race worldwide; in the succeeding decades, while the animal population has exploded, the human population has remained low.  Today's humans are the descendants of people who lived way out in the country when the nukes hit, people who readily adapted to a sort of pre-civilized lifestyle (though they seem to rely very heavily on the use of firearms retrieved from the ruins.)  Our three heroes enjoy their lives as hunters; the Native American celebrates the current lack of racism, war, taxes, and greed and even damns any suggestion that they might try to revive agriculture; Bloch even has Doc use the hackneyed phrase "living in harmony with nature."  

The plot of "Where the Buffalo Roam" involves the arrival of a rocket from the moon.  Right before the atomic war, the moon was colonized, and today there are 40,000 people up there with all kinds of high technology.  The men from the rocket make clear that, if they return to Luna with a report that Earth is habitable, the moon people will colonize the Earth and recreate 20th-century civilization; should people like the narrator and his friends try to stop them, the lunar people will use their superior weapons to compel acquiescence.  Essentially, the loonies will do to America what Europeans did to America after the arrival of Columbus.  The narrator and his friends outfight the rocket ship crew, slay them, and then direct a herd of buffalo to stampede over the rocket, causing it to explode.  America has been saved from civilization!  

I hate the idea of living like a savage or a barbarian with no art or literature or technology, and of course reject the idea that war and greed and crime are the product of technology and civilization and that people lived in perfect peace before being corrupted by agriculture or money or the city or whatever.  (Bloch here is plowing the furrow so often worked by Chad Oliver that I find so annoying.)  Beyond its ideology, there isn't much to "Where the Buffalo Roam," though the style isn't offensively bad.  I guess we can call it competent filler and thus grade it barely acceptable.  (The critics can go right on bitching about post-apocalyptic tales and pseudo-Westerns as far as I am concerned!)

"Is Betsy Blake Still Alive?" (1958)

Bloch spent a lot of time in the town we call Hollyweird, and he wrote many stories about how Tinseltown and its inhabitants were corrupt and perverted trash.  And here's another one, the story of the relationship of two men who are both trying to make it in Hollywood.

Both Steve and Jimmy have cottages by a cliff overlooking the Pacific.  Steve has made no progress trying to be a writer in Hollywood, but Jimmy has become rich working in publicity.  The story makes it clear that Jimmy owes his success to his willingness to be unscrupulous.  Steve, who has scruples, resorts to writing a novel.

One day Jimmy comes by with an offer for Steve (or as Jimmy calls him, "Stevie-boy") and a complicated story.  America's attention has been glued to the shocking news of the death of Betsey Blake, an actress known as "The Blonde Baby" and "Miss Mystery" because she was a private person and little was known about her pre-Hollywood life or even her current private life.  For some days she and her boat were considered merely lost, but then a body assumed to be hers washed up on the beach.

Jimmy makes his money doing PR for the film studio for which Blake worked, much of it connected to Blake, so her death--just after she finished shooting a big picture--was a problem for his bosses and especially for him.  So Jimmy had the idea of ginning up public interest in Blake and her last film by planting all kinds of wild stories in the press speculating on her early life and private affairs, exaggerating her beauty and talent, promoting wacky theories that she had faked her death, etc.  Jimmy wants Steve the wordsmith to help him concoct all these lies, and Steve refuses.

Some months later, just before that final film of Blake's is about to debut, Steve and Jimmy are hanging out when a drunken fat woman appears--it is Betsey Blake!  That body that washed up was some other woman!  Blake was rescued by a Mexican ship and has spent the last few months having an affair with its Mexican captain and chowing down and hitting the sauce, ruining her figure and having the time of her life!  Jimmy's PR campaign of lies and innuendo has been a success, and the appearance of Blake threatens to ruin his career!  So he pushes the poor woman off the cliff and tries to bribe Steve (or as Jimmy calls him, "Stevie-burger") to help him conceal the murder.

Adequate filler.  Bloch limits his wordplay to "Stevie-burger" and Jimmy accidentally calling Anastasia Nikolayevna "Anesthesia," which I actually found funny.  Old Hollywood buffs may enjoy how Jimmy (apparently) bases his big PR campaign on that devised to promote Rudolph Valentino's last picture after the Latin Lover croaked.  "Is Betsy Blake Still Alive?" is a little better than "Where the Buffalo Roam," but maybe I just think that because I don't mind when people attack Hollywood. 

This baby made its debut in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; Bloch's name appears on the magazine's dignified tongue-in-cheek subscription cover but not the sensational woman-in-peril newsstand cover.  On the cover of EQMM and on the contents page of my copy of Blood Runs Cold the title of the story appears as "Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?" but at isfdb and on the page the story begins in my paperback the title appears as "Is Betsy Blake Still Alive?"  Within the story itself, the woman's name is spelled "Betsey."  To add to the confusion, isfdb says that in 1987 and 1990 printings of Bloch collections, the story appears under the title "Betsy Blake Will Live Forever."      

"Final Performance" (1960) 

This is actually a pretty good story with a pretty disgusting ending and some pretty gross sexual content, though I suppose it is sort of unbelievable in spots.

The narrator of "Final Performance" is a writer and he tells us of the horrible experience he had while driving across the desert on his way to settle in Hollywood.  His car broke down and he ended up staying at the shuttered motel of a retired old vaudevillian who was still running the establishment as a restaurant with a sexy twenty-something waitress.  A drunk, the restaurateur formerly known as Randolph the Great falls asleep after bragging about how he knew lots of famous vaudeville people back in the day, which gives Bloch a chance to unleash on us a list of people famous in the '20s and '30s and largely forgotten today.

(Many Bloch stories include lists of pop culture people and phenomena.)  

After Randolph is asleep, the sexalicious blonde waitress with the freckles and the "fine breasts," Rosie, tells our narrator the score.  Her parents were vaudevillians and left her with Randolph when she was a kid.  They disappeared and Randolph raised her.  When she turned sixteen he began using her sexually and after she tried to escape he closed the motel and kept her prisoner.  She begs the narrator to rescue her, has sex with him, even suggests she is in love with him.   

They plan their getaway but things don't work out for them.  The climactic horror scene has Randolph, who we learn at the end of the story was a ventriloquist, using the corpse of Rosie, whom he has murdered, as a dummy, operating her head by reaching up through a wound in her back.  Somewhat unbelievably, the narrator is initially fooled by Randolph's performance; when the writer gets wise, Randolph commits suicide.

The whole idea of using a freshly dead body as a ventriloquist's dummy is sort of incredible, but also a good bit of horror gore.  Unfortunately, Bloch compounds the obstacles to the reader's ability to suspend disbelief by describing the murder weapon--a "big broad-bladed butcher knife"--and then telling us, after a character drops it, that it "rolled across the floor."  How would such a heavy and asymmetrical tool roll on a floor?  This is what people who watch sports on TV call an "unforced error;" there is no reason the knife has to roll anywhere.       

Despite its problems, I like this one, as the gore is pretty way out and the characters' motivations and relationships all make sense and are all compelling and disturbing; it helps that disastrous sexual relationships and suicide are among my favorite topics.

"Final Performance"'s initial appearance was in Shock, whose editors considered it the top draw of the issue.  This issue also includes a rare story by R. A. Lafferty that I hopefully will have an opportunity to read someday.  Marvin Allen Karp and Irving Settel included "Final Performance" in 1965's Suddenly, an anthology of "great stories of suspense and the unexpected," and Richard Matheson and Ricia Mainhardt included it in a 1990s tribute volume that featured Bloch stories as well as contributions from such Bloch fans as two of the most widely beloved members of the speculative fiction community, Ray Bradbury and Christopher Lee.

"All on a Golden Afternoon" (1956)

"All on a Golden Afternoon" debuted in F&SF; editor: the aforementioned Anthony Boucher.  The story was later included in The Best of Robert Bloch, and Poul and Karen Anderson selected it for their 1997 anthology The Night Fantastic.  

Another show biz story, this one with lots of irritating puns and other species of weak distracting jokes.  "Dr. Prager's glance swept the shelves, which were badly in need of dusting anyway."  Ouch.

Medical man Prager has been summoned to the vast and heavily guarded estate of Hollywood actress Eve Eden, who is known as "The First Woman of the Ten Box-Office Leaders."  Eden has Prager on retainer; he is her therapist, and numerous times in the past has resolved problems resulting from her various bad decisions--drug use, suicide attempts, sexual promiscuity.  But today Eden's agent has called Prager in hopes he can get the actress to reverse what he considers Eden's worst possible decision: a resolution to quit show biz! 

When Prager gets to Eden's room she relates to him her recent dream; this dream is a beat for beat retelling of Alice in Wonderland, and we readers have to endure several pages of Lewis Carroll synopsis with added psychoanalysis jargon from Prager/Bloch.  Reading this is a chore, but I guess it is supposed to be funny, a goof on Freudianism and its adherents.  Bloch often writes about psychology and psychological theories, and in his body of work as a whole there is a tension--does Bloch think the modern discipline and practice of psychology is a load of crap, or does he take it seriously as providing insight into how people behave, a valuable tool in the struggle to heal people and solve and prevent crime?  

It turns out that a guy who knew Lewis Caroll, a fellow mathematician, has figured out the formulae that permit people to enter dream worlds and he has come to 20th-century California to help sad Hollywood denizens leave our world and start happier lives in dream worlds.  Eden had a sad childhood and an erratic adulthood and has never been happy, and so this time traveler is helping her transition from the left coast to Wonderland where she will live happily as Alice.  Prager tries to stop Eden and makes some bad decisions himself and suffers; Eden has a happy ending.

"All on a Golden Afternoon" is like a Platonic ideal of a Robert Bloch story: set in Hollywood, it features lots of lame wordplay and pop psychology content and integrates into its own plot a famous plot with which you are already familiar.  When I was reading the distracting puns and the tedious synopsis of Alice in Wonderland I was certain I was going to give this one a thumbs down, but Eden and Prager's motivations and actions are actually well done and held my interest.  So this one is tough to grade.  Guess we'll average it out to acceptable.      

"The Gloating Place" (1959)

"The Gloating Place" made its debut in the men's magazine Rogue, in the same issue as Harlan Ellison's story about the threat posed to the world of jazz by a femme fatale, "Have Coolth," which we read back in August.  Besides Bloch collections, "The Gloating Place" would reappear in a German anthology, 22 Horror Stories.

As in "All on a Golden Afternoon," in "The Gloating Place" Bloch, a man, explores the psychology of a sad female.  Our sad sack here is pimply and dumpy Susan Harper, who in this story does something I guess nowadays we are supposed to think women never actually do--make up a false claim of attempted rape!

High school girl Susan is lonely, has a crush on a guy in her class, Tom, who is in love with a pretty girl in class, Marjorie, and has parents that nag her to do chores all the time.  So, to get sympathy and attention, she claimed a strange guy in a mask assaulted her and she fought him off before he could rape her.  The police and the journalists and some of the other kids gave her lots of attention in response, and her folks stopped nagging her, but as she sits in her "gloating place," an abandoned corner of a park to which she goes to be alone, Susan realizes her life is not really going to change--in particular, her crush Tom is not going to abandon class beauty Marjorie and finally notice Susan.  So Susan concocts a radical scheme to take care of the Marjorie problem and really shake things up!

This is a pretty good crime story that delivers the creepy sex and violence against women that the cover image and the first page of my paperback edition promise readers.  One of the interesting things about the story, and a much more thought-provoking use of psychology than Bloch's barrage of Freudian catch-phrases in "All of a Golden Afternoon," is Bloch's presentation of the theory that descriptions of crime in the newspapers inspire unstable people to commit crime.  A cop tells Susan this theory while urging her to refrain from talking to reporters, and in a self aware moment Susan realizes that reading her own fake account of being attacked sort of inspired her to murder Marjorie.  Then, in the story's final scene, a local mental case, presumably inspired by media reports of Susan's own lie and her own atrocity, murders Susan.

(Here we have another example of the tension pervasive in Bloch's work--he seems to be blaming the media and its printing of stories about violence for causing violence, but his whole career is based upon printing tales of violence.)

I like it, and I'm certainly glad I could end today's batch of stories on a high note.

**********

Two good stories that go light on the jokes and provide the evil sex and women-in-peril thrills that are the reason you would buy this book, an OK Hollywood-centric crime tale, and two science fiction stories with severe problems that I convinced myself are not, in the final equation, actually bad.  A respectable batch of stories, I guess we have to say.  Hopefully the next time we crack open Blood Runs Cold this streak will continue.