Robert Bloch: "The Chaney Legacy," "The Yougoslaves," and "Pranks"

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, we read a story by Avram Davidson that appeared in a 1986 issue of Night Cry, the horror magazine full of J. K. Potter illustrations put out by the people who produced the Twilight Zone magazine.  That same issue printed a story by Robert Bloch, so let's read it, and two other stories published by the creator of Norman Bates in that year.

"The Chaney Legacy"

Bloch's career is all wrapped up in Hollywood, even if he often portrays Hollywood as a den of iniquity and American popular culture in general as deplorable.  "The Chaney Legacy" is set in Tinseltown, and in the story Bloch unleashes a barrage of silent era movie biz trivia at us, as well as demonstrating his familiarity with Los Angeles geography.  Some of this material is kind of interesting, and the rest is not annoying, so it doesn't hamper the plot and atmosphere and I can moderately recommend "The Chaney Legacy" as a conventional and perhaps obvious but competently put together horror story.

Dale is fascinated by cinema, obsessed, even.  He teaches a film history course at a college and aspires to write books on the movies of early Hollywood.  And when he has the opportunity to rent an ugly little house purportedly once occupied by silent film legend Lon Chaney (father of the today more famous Lon Chaney, Jr.) he jumps at the chance, even though his girlfriend, Debbie the radio newscaster, dumps him rather than move into the remote and uncomfortable "dump."

The Latina Dale hires to clean the Chaney house discovers an old box and Dale's mind is blown when he realizes it is Lon Chaney's make up kit!  Dale sees strange faces looking back at him from the mirror on the inside lid of the kit, and, to make a long story short, Dale runs a terrible risk and learns the secret of how Chaney and other horror greats were able to so effectively portray characters physically and psychologically deformed.  You see, guys like Chaney, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi would conceive the monstrous personas upon which they built their careers and then project those psychic constructions into a magical mirror.  Then, when it can time to perform on stage or screen, they could download the required persona from the mirror back into their own brains.  Dale has made an amazing discovery, but is also in horrible danger--the monsters Chaney created (and Bloch offers a long list of them, from the one-eyed whoremaster of The Road to Mandalay to the armless knife thrower of The Unknown) are still alive in the mirror and they seek another chance to inhabit a human body and the world beyond the make up kit and try to take over Dale.

I enjoyed it.  After its debut in Night Cry, "The Chaney Legacy" was included in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling (along with our next story, "The Yougoslaves,") and a bunch of anthologies, among them and Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks and John Betancourt's New Masterpieces of Horror, on the cover of which Bloch gets top billing, above even Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Joyce Carol Oates.  

(I'll note here that I am reading both "The Chaney Legacy" and "The Yougoslaves" in scans of the issues of Night Cry in which they debuted.)

"The Yougoslaves"

Another story that first saw print in Night Cry and is boldly trumpeted on the cover.  "The Yougoslaves," "a novelette" that you should feel free to call "The Yougo-Enslaved Persons" if you must, seems to have been a hit; Stephen Jones, Martin H. Greenberg and Karl Edward Wagner all included it in anthologies over the next ten years. 

Remember in 2015 when we read Bloch's 1989 novel Lori and I told you one of its themes was of an America in decline?  Well, it's not only the U S of A that is in decline in Bloch's eyes--France is also going down the tubes!  At least that is what our narrator thinks, based on his current visit to Paris.  Things get still worse when a pack of swarthy kids younger than ten years old swarm him and pick his pocket.  The gendarmes tell our narrator that his assailants were "gypsies" (whom you should feel free to call "the Roma" if you must) and our hero learns from the clerk at his hotel that in recent years these little Eastern-European scamps have, apparently trained and directed by organized crime, become a real scourge on the streets of the City of Light, one which the police are unable--or is it unwilling?--to mitigate.  

Our guy doesn't care about money, but there is something in his wallet he desperately needs back.  So he undertakes a solo mission to secure this unspecified bit of property, capturing one of the little gypsies and using violence to get the address of yougoslave HQ out of him.  The thief offers our narrator drugs, little girls, even his own nine-year-old body (gross!) in an effort to dissuade his captor from contacting "Le Boss" and revealing his own failure, to no avail--our guy is determined to get the contents of his wallet back.

Le Boss's lair is a disused sewer lit by candles; Le Boss is a huge fatso with "fingers thick as sausages."  Le Boss summons his pack of kids away from their playtime raping a five-year-old girl (yikes!) to kill the narrator, but then comes our twist--the narrator is a vampire and summons his own pack--of voracious rats!--to dispose of the kids.  Le Boss's revolver has little effect on the narrator, and soon our protagonist is feasting on the obese criminal mastermind.  Oh yeah, the thing the vampire sought from his wallet was the key to his tomb.  

A pretty good adventure/horror story; for a long time I figured Le Boss and/or the kids were vampires--after all, Bloch tells us one of the kids has old eyes and that Le Boss is pale--not the narrator.  The theme of disgusting sex involving children and the horrible deaths suffered by all the children in the story gives "The Yougoslaves" an exploitative edge.

"Pranks" 

"Pranks" debuted in Alan Ryan's anthology Halloween Horrors.  "Pranks" seems to have had a fraught publication history; according to isfdb, at least one edition of Halloween Horrors was heavily edited by some freelancer without authorization from the publisher and then destroyed, and when "Pranks" appeared in Chills and Thrills: The Ultimate Anthology of the Mystical, Magical, Eerie and Uncanny some kind of error left the last two lines of the story missing.  Well, don't worry kids, I am reading "Pranks" in a recent electronic edition of the 1987 Bloch collection Midnight Pleasures.

Instead of introducing us to a character and then relating to us his or her adventure or series of challenges or whatever, "Pranks" is one of those stories which consists of a series of scenes or vignettes each starring a different group of characters.  I find this kind of thing irritating.

The little vignettes that make up "Pranks" take place on the evening of Halloween and Bloch makes sure to tell us what time it is in each scene.  First we've got a couple with no children who make a big deal of the holiday, putting on elaborate costumes and relishing a chance to offer candy to the kids who come to the door.  Then we have a married couple with two kids; Dad is cranky and hates Halloween and complains that Mom spent too much on the kids' outfits.  Then a married couple with twins--they send the little girls off to trick or treat and then jump into bed to have sex, which they rarely do because the twins are always around.  Then we've got a priest who is visiting a couple whose kids are out trick-or-treating--the priest implies that Halloween is serious business, that it is a day on which Satan's power waxes and maybe his parishioners shouldn't have sent their kids out alone.  Then a couple who return home from a party to find their lax babysitter let their little boy leave the house like an hour ago and the boy has not yet returned.  

The finale is a one-two punch.  All the kids in the story, and others besides to a total of thirteen, have vanished, and we readers learn they were seized and killed by the couple in the first vignette when they came to collect their candy; the Halloween-loving couple are apparently cannibals and are going to eat the kids.  (Trick-or-treaters whose parents accompanied them were allowed to leave the house of death unmolested.)  The second punch is that, after midnight, the spot where the cannibals' house was standing has reverted to a vacant lot--I guess the killers are ghosts or demons or whatever whose house appears only on Halloween, in a different town each year.

"Pranks" is more of an idea than an actual story, and I'm not crazy about its apparent message--that you should be a helicopter parent.  It is short, so doesn't have enough time to really get on your nerves, but I was certainly glad when I got to the end of it.  We'll be nice and call it barely acceptable.

1987 and 1991 editions of Midnight Pleasures

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"Pranks" is bordering on being a waste of time, but "The Chaney Legacy" and "The Yougoslaves" are entertaining horror stories, the Hollywood story a pretty traditional one buoyed by references to largely forgotten movies and the Paris one energized by graphic violence, twisted sexual elements and a pretty good twist ending.  (Are the sex elements and the killing of children in "The Yougoslaves" and "Pranks" Bloch's response to the splatterpunk movement?)  Bloch also keeps the social commentary and the jokes to a manageable level in the two Night Cry stories, which is welcome.

We'll probably get around to reading all the stories in Fear and Trembling and Midnight Pleasures some day, but it will be stories by other authors culled from old magazines when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.