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Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Robert Bloch: "The Creeper in the Crypt," "The Sorcerer's Jewel" and "The Curse of the House"


Let's read three late 1930s stories by correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, prolific screenwriter, and author of American classic Psycho, Robert Bloch.  We've got one from seminal speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales, and two from the very first issue of WT competitor Strange Stories, a bi-monthly put out by the same people who produced Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories.  These stories are available in a number of books, but I am reading them in scans of the original FDR-era magazines. 

"The Creeper in the Crypt" (1937)

Forty-odd years after its debut in Weird Tales, Robert M. Price included "The Creeper in the Crypt" in the sixteenth issue of Crypt of Cthulhu, and a decade after that he put it in a second (1993) edition of the Bloch collection Mysteries of the Worm.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have actually read most of the stories from Mysteries of the Worm; below find the links to my blog posts about them. 

It is not surprising that "The Creeper in the Crypt" was not included by Lin Carter in the first (1981) edition of Mysteries of the Worm; it is a mediocre filler story.  Set in the fictional New England town of Arkham, famous from Lovecraft's body of work, Bloch writes "The Creeper in the Crypt" in a sort of hard-boiled detective style, straightforward and simple, with little jokes and sarcastic dialogue.

Our narrator is a painter, descendent of a long line of Arkham denizens back to the town's founding.  Two New York gangsters, a swarthy Italian and a superstitious Pole, kidnap him; he wakes up from being knocked out to find himself in a cellar with two doors in it, one leading to a little fruit cellar, the other a sturdy metal affair.  The narrator recognizes the cellar from stories he heard from old geezers during his childhood years--he is being held below a long-abandoned house reputed to be the lair of an 18th-century wizard and a 19th-century smuggler and graverobber.  The metal door is said to be locked from the outside, and lead to a labyrinth of passages under the local cemetery, the home of monsters with whom the colonial era sorcerer had some kind of relationship.  As if the narrator's memories aren't foreshadowing enough, Bloch also has the superstitious Pole fret that the last gangster to use this cellar as a hide out was found mutilated, his scanty remains covered in bite marks.  The Italian thinks the hints that a monster ate that guy are a load of hogwash, insisting that some rival gang killed him and left the body in that state to scare off the competition.

The Italian has the Pole secure the painter in that fruit cellar and then sends the superstitious immigrant off to deliver a ransom note to the narrator's people.  Through the fruit cellar's closed door the narrator hears the metal door in the main cellar open while the Italian dozes, and then the Italian's last horrible moments as a monster slays and devours him.  After the narrator hears the metal door close, he escapes, having cut his bonds with glass from broken fruit jars.  

There is nothing really wrong with "The Creeper in the Crypt," but it is quite minor; we grade this one merely acceptable.

"The Sorcerer's Jewel" (1939)

Here's another story that Robert M. Price added to the second edition of Mysteries of the Worm, but this one debuted not in Weird Tales but in Strange Stories, Number 1 of Volume 1.  Bloch had two stories in that inaugural issue; "The Sorcerer's Jewel" appeared under the pen name Tarleton Fiske.  In the 1970s and '80s, "The Sorcerer's Jewel" appeared in multiple periodicals, including fanzines From Beyond the Dark Gateway and Fantasy Tales.

"The Creeper in the Crypt" started off by telling us that a guy had died under mysterious circumstances, and then described those circumstances, and "The Sorcerer's Jewel" has a somewhat similar structure; on page one the narrator tells us that his friend David is either dead, or has disappeared in some appalling fashion and is suffering a fate perhaps worse than death.

The narrator is one of those guys who studies the occult--we meet these guys all the time in our reading here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  His pal David was a talented photographer who got sick of shooting portraits of rich people for money--he wanted to create innovative art photos, to photograph the fantastic!  David tries various mundane techniques, like putting models into make up so they look like mythological monsters, and making little dioramas of Hell populated by sculpted demons.  These do not satisfy.  The narrator then comes up with something really novel--he visits a friend who has an antique shop and acquires a big jewel that is purported to have been used by wizards to communicate with horrific beings from other dimensions.  He even has this friend cut the jewel so it can be fitted as a lens to David's camera!

Sure enough, when they look through the viewfinder of the camera equipped with the jewel lens, the narrator and David see monsters in a hellish landscape.  The narrator gets the willies, suspecting that the demons can look back through the jewel at them, and may even be able to reach through the weird lens to drag them to their own horrific plane of existence.  But David is committed to his art, ignoring the narrator's warnings and forging on without the narrator's aid.  The narrator pays a visit to that antiques dealer and finds him dead, presumably punished by the demons of the other dimension for tampering with the jewel, their precious bridge to our dimension.  When the narrator checks on David, he finds the photographer's mutilated body.

This story is a little heavy on the speculative lectures and on perhaps superfluous exposition that comes to us in the form of dialogue between characters.  For example, the narrator expounds at length on a theory based on individual psychology in an effort to explain why he and David see totally different monsters when they look through the jewel, and the antique dealer describes at length the provenance of the particular jewel in the story as well as a history of the use of jewels in divination.  

I'm not finding "The Sorcerer's Jewel" lovable, but it is tolerable.


"The Curse of the House" (1939)

Here's the story from the February 1939 Strange Stories that appeared under Bloch's real name.  Of the three stories we are reading today, "The Curse of the House" is the best, because of the three it best conveys human emotion and has the most original and interesting ideas--that a house inhabited by wizards for many generations can take on a life and personality--  
Here was the real wizard, the true viewer of all secrets.  This house had seen it all.  It lived, it leered down from the hill.
--and that a house itself can be a sort of ghost or undead monster that haunts the man who destroyed it.

Our narrator is a psychiatrist, but the main storyteller is one of his patients, Will Banks, yet another of these guys who travels the world studying the occult.  Banks is especially interested in the way witches use geometric patterns in their efforts to see into or contact other dimensions, also one of the themes of "The Sorcerer's Jewel."  The lion's share of the text of "The Curse of the House" consists of Banks relating to the shrink the story of his visit to a 16th-century house in Edinburgh that has always been owned by and occupied by the Droome family, a family of sorcerers, and the horrible aftermath of his cataclysmic visit.  Bloch does a good job describing the house and Banks' adventure there, putting a lot of flesh on the bones of the idea that the house is somehow alive and malignant and entertainingly depicting the way his experience affects Banks psychologically.

Banks sought out the Droome house because he wanted to investigate its cellars, to see if there were any geometric patterns inscribed on the cellar walls.  The last living Droome welcomed Banks, but refused permission to access the cellars.  However, perhaps intentionally laying a trap for the investigator, Droome left open an opportunity for Banks to sneak down into the cellars, where he descried a horrible scene!  Droome came after him with a knife, but Banks won the ensuing fight, killing Droome and then setting the house ablaze and narrowly escaping the inferno. 

That was ten years ago.  Since, Banks has been haunted by visions of the Droome house.  Two or three times a year, if he should be outside near a hill at the same time of day he first saw the Droome house, Banks will see upon that hill, beckoning to him, the Scottish house where he fought for his life.  Banks has been moving hither and thither, all over the world, and striving to stay inside at the dreaded time of day, but sometimes circumstances lead to him being unable to avoid the horrifying vision, and each time he has the vision, the house is closer!

Our narrator, the shrink, thinks to cure Banks by forcing him to confront what the narrator assumes to be a delusion brought on by an unhealthy obsession based on guilt.  So the psychiatrist contrives a situation ideally suited to trigger Banks' vision while he, the shrink, is there at his side.  The story climaxes with the doctor's witnessing the final of Banks' Droome house-related episodes.

I can give this one a thumbs up; "The Curse of the House" is a better than average component of Robert Bloch's huge body of work.  "The Curse of the House" would be reprinted in 1989 in Robert M. Price's Pulp Magazine and the 2008 Bloch collection Skeleton in the Closet.  In 1949 "The Curse of the House" appeared alongside a story by Jack Williamson and one by E. Hoffman Price in an unusual British publication, a little magazine apparently called American Fiction whose true selling point was perhaps the artistic female nude photo on its cover.


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One of these stories is quite good, and the other two are not noisome, so a pretty smooth road this blog post.  Taken as a group, we might see these three tales as useful as illustrations of Bloch's influences and interests early in his career, among them Lovecraft's work and psychological theory.

The next transmission across the aether from MPorcius Fiction Log will concern itself with still more strange material.  Stay tuned.

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