All three of today's stories saw reprint in the 1998 collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, a book which I mentioned in our last blog post, as well as a 1986 French collection with an amateurish cover illustration--zoinks, is that Bloch himself on the cover, caught in the act of molesting a green female mummy? The title story of Les cadavres ne meurent jamais, "The Dead Don't Die!," we read way back in 2018, early in our now old and comfortable relationship with Bob "Psycho" Bloch. Note that I am going to read these stories in their 1939 form in a scan of the issue of Strange Stories in which they first appeared.
"A Question of Identity" treads very familiar ground, but it is well-written, so I enjoyed it. So, thumbs up! Besides the aforementioned books put out by Arkham House and our freres over in Gaul, "A Question of Identity" would be reprinted in 1983 in the British magazine Fantasy Tales edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton.
This story begins with a longish description of Rhine cards and a depiction of their use by a college professor with his class. (Wikipedia calls these "Zener cards"; is "Rhine cards" like "B.C.," "retard" and "Negro," once common terms that have been replaced in our day by verbiage considered more sympathetic, or is Bloch just making a mistake here?) One student, Harry Clinton, is particularly good, amazingly good in fact, at guessing which card has been drawn, and he and prof spend a lot of time together experimenting. As the months go by, Harry gets better and better at guessing the cards, but otherwise his mental state gets worse--his memory becomes poor, for example, and he suffers headaches and fatigue. Sometimes the images from the cards--cross, circle, etc.--come to his mind unbidden during his off campus daily life. He begins to have bouts of amnesia.
I think I've read eight stories by Ralph Milne Farley, and thought them all at least OK. Here find links to my blog posts about them.
Nothing groundbreaking here, but two solid entertainments and one acceptable piece that demonstrates for the hundredth time Bloch's interest in psychology and wordplay. Perhaps ironically, I think Bloch's best work is that which relies least on in-your-face psychological jargon and theories and least on puns and double entendres. Maybe that stuff is more "literary" or "original" than vampires and Yog-Sothothery, but I find the metaphors of the vampire and of Lovecraftian alien monster gods more emotionally powerful and better at representing my view of life and the universe than Freudianism and puns.
"A Question of Identity" by Robert Bloch (as by Tarleton Fiske)
"A Question of Identity" is a first person narrative. A guy has been buried alive! He can't remember his true identity! He fights his way out of his grave, walks around at night, eventually remembers who he is and how he died, goes to his fiancé's place and, as the story ends, realizes he is a vampire and is about to drink his horrified betrothed's blood.
The plot is obvious but Bloch does a good job describing the narrator's mental state--his emotions and his confusion--and his experiences of busting out of the coffin and exploring the cemetery and the town. The tone and pacing are just right. A creditable piece of work.
"Death Has Five Guesses" by Robert Bloch
Bloch loves puns and double entendres and homophones and that sort of thing, and he employs such devices here in "Death Has Five Guesses." As you know, each Rhine/Zener card has one of five simple symbols printed on it. Bloch's story becomes repetitive as Clinton, during amnesiac episodes, commits murders, one after the other, each thematically related to one of the five symbols. For example, when his mind is oppressed by the image of the star, he takes up a mace, the head of which has five points, and kills a movie actress, you know, a "star." Eventually Clinton kills himself.
This story is just OK, though well-written enough on a sentence by sentence basis. "Death Has Five Guesses" is long and repetitive for one thing, what with the description of the cards and then five different killings. Another problem is that the killings are largely lacking in motivation--when a person kills his or her spouse because spouse was stifling or cheating, or kills his or her boss or a business partner over envy or theft or whatever, it is easier to identify with murderer and with victim, but in "Death Has Five Guesses" the killer is killing for somewhat silly and contrived reasons and the victims lack personality and sometimes any connection to the killer.
As the story proceeded, I was kind of hoping that, like in Warhammer 40,000 (at least the WH40K I paid attention to in the '80s and '90s), opening up his psychic powers had opened up Harry Clinton to control by alien monsters or the Devil, and I guess that reading is possible given the vague way Bloch explains what is going on in "Death Has Five Guesses," but it seems more likely that Clinton just went insane. Not a bad story, but an overly long and convoluted filler piece. I guess the emphasis on the trappings of psychology makes this the most characteristic of Bloch's work of today's three tales.
"The Bottomless Pool" by Robert Bloch and Ralph Milne Farley (as by Ralph Milne Farley)
It would be wild if collaborating with the far more famous Bloch dragged down Farley's batting average here at the MFL.
The text of "The Bottomless Pool" is a testimonial penned by a man at risk of being accused of murder by the authorities. You see, our narrator is a writer, and he had a friend who was a writer, but who was in poor health and had a terrible case of writer's block. So the narrator invited his pal up to his cabin in the woods to relax. Pal got better, and was always wanting to take hikes and explore the woods. Pal actually grew up in this area, and takes the narrator to a sinister spot in the swamp he visited once as a kid--the Bottomless Pool!
The Bottomless Pool is like six feet across, and the writers see floating on its black inky surface a dead lizard. When our guy tries to retrieve this specimen he finds a wire is attached to the little corpse and a hook is imbedded in the little dead creature. When the line is jerked back under the water the hook slashes our guy painfully.
The wound gives our guy a fever and he stays in while his friend investigates the obviously true but totally incredible fact that some kind of monster of the underworld is fishing for human beings through the eerie pool. When the friend fails to return, our feverish narrator, a little out of his mind, continues the investigations and comes face to face with the reptilian fisher of the nether depths and retrieves an artifact of that secret world. But will anybody believe him? Will the government take steps to close up the pool?
This is a good story when it comes to topic, theme, pacing, etc. So thumbs up. (Farley's record here at MPorcius Fiction Log is safe!) In general the style is good, but there are some odd word choices, clumsy metaphors, that should have been revised or excised. I refer to "The limbs of dead trees interred the sunlight" and "warm blood scalded the deep wound in my side." I checked a scan of 1998's Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies and "interred" and "scalded" are still there, so multiple professional writers and editors think the words I find distractingly inappropriate to be just fine. What can I say?
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More magazine short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be rotating the time machine dial forward 20 clicks.
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