The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 27: Lord of the Desert

It's very easy to forget how many different areas of horror Robert Bloch managed to cover in his long career. At some point in his career, unquestionably after Hitchcock's adaptation of Psycho was released, Bloch became known primarily as a writer of non-supernatural horror and suspense, but you didn't even have to know his work solely through that film or novel. When I was growing up, my reading of Bloch was restricted to what I could find in used bookstores, which tended to mean that I was reading the various Tor reprints of suspense novels Bloch wrote in the 1950s, 60s, and, well, so on -- the Tor reprints covered a lot of years. But among those novels, none of them (that I read), not The Kidnapper or Firebug or The Night of the Ripper or Night-World or American Gothic, involved any kind of supernatural element. One Bloch novel that Tor published at around that time, Lori, was a ghost story, but it was at the time a new novel (1989), plus I didn't read it until many years afterwards, and, not that this is exactly relevant to my point, it was far from Bloch's finest hour.

Bloch's specialty, the popular perception went, was writing about killers, not exactly of the everyday type, but at least of the technically possible type (another contributing factor to this was the amount of Jack the Ripper-related fiction Bloch wrote). He also gained a reputation for writing short stories that ended with a kind of punchline, some horrifying revelation in the last sentence that gave the whole thing its punch. The first Bloch books I ever read, before I even read Psycho, were a pair of story collections from the 1980s, published by Tor, called Midnight Pleasures and Fear and Trembling, and the two stories I remember best are "Nocturnes" and "The Night Before Christmas," both of which end in punchlines, neither of which are supernatural, and, for the record, both are terrific. So he was good at this stuff, but it might surprise some people -- not you, probably, but some people -- to learn that Bloch was originally another, albeit earlier than most, Lovecraft acolyte. Lovecraft even replied to a young Robert Bloch's fan letter with writing advice. And that Lovecraft influence could be found rather heavily in his early work. (By the way, I know that there are plenty of supernatural stories in both Midnight Pleasures and Fear and Trembling -- I just don't remember them.)

It was not my intention today to write about Robert Bloch's Lovecraftian fiction. As I think I've made clear this month, the whole world of Lovecraftians, and even Lovecraft himself to a degree, is starting to wear me out. My intention was only to write about Bloch, a man I wrote only a glancing post about several years ago. Since I've gone back to several other horror writers since loosening up the restrictions I originally placed on myself, I figured Bloch was more than deserving of a second go 'round, and so from my bookshelf I removed my old Belmont paperback copy of his 1962 collection Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (that title story is probably the most famous and most influential thing Bloch ever wrote, outside of Psycho, of course). I picked two stories I hadn't read, based on their titles, and have only myself to blame if I somehow didn't wonder to myself "I wonder if this Robert Bloch story called 'The Faceless God' is going to be anything like H. P. Lovecraft, who Bloch so admired." I must have. This was just yesterday, so I should remember, but I must have.

The other thing is, also unplanned, both the stories were set in Egypt (there's at least one other Egypt story in this book, called "Beetles"). The setting of one of those, "The Eyes of the Mummy," could be assumed. The plot is very basic: our narrator is fascinated by Egypt and its strange myths, but following a strange and fatal incident that occurred before the story's action, one involving a possibly supernatural occurrence the resulted in the death of a colleague, he withdrew from this field of interest. Until, that is, one day when another colleague, Professor Weildan, approaches him with an opportunity that seems hard to resist. Basically, go to Egypt, where there's this tomb that has a mummy in it, a mummy of a priest from an ancient, diabolical cult. But because of this priest's outcast status at the time of his death, the tomb is for all intents and purposes unknown, and Weildan assures our narrator that there will be jewels a-plenty. Once in Egypt, though, things get dicey when Weildan meets with their contact and spy, who our narrator overhears the two men arguing -- the spy seems afraid. And although the narrator doesn't see this, it's pretty clear that Weildan murders the man. The fact that Weildan does this, and the narrator knows he did it and doesn't flee, should tell you something about both of them.

They get to the tomb, and things are looking up when they throw off the mummy's lid and see two astonishing jewels in place of the corpse's eyes:

Two great yellow disks burned up at us through the darkness. Not diamonds or sapphires or opals were they, or any known stone; their enormous size precluded any thought of inclusion in a common category. They were not cut or faceted, yet they blinded with their brightness -- a fierce flashing stabbed our retinas like naked fire.

These were the jewels we sought -- and they had been worth seeking. I stooped to remove them, but Weildan's voice restrained me.

"Don't," [Weildan] warned. "We'll get them later, without harming the mummy."

I heard his voice as though from afar. I was not conscious of again standing erect. Instead I remained stopped over those flaming stones. I stared at them.

So the narrator is pretty taken with these jewels, and I'll halt the plot summary right there. What I found interesting about this one -- and this is a very solid story overall -- was its treatment of the mummy. It's not a shambling, be-bandanged pseudo-zombies, it's a much more psychological thing here, but then, early on, mummies usually weren't shambling, be-bandanged pseudo-zombies. The original Freund/Karloff 1932 film feature the mummy that way very briefly, as a highly effective early mood-setter, but after that Karloff's Imhotep can pass as living. Those bandages became a staple later on in the Universal films, but then those stopped, and more recently in those iffy Stephen Sommers mummies are like ghost demons or something. Yet the bandages are what we think of when we hear the word. Isn't that interesting? No? Well, I thought it was.

"The Eyes of the Mummy" connects to "The Faceless God" beyond the shared Egypt setting. This plays into "The Faceless God" more, but in both you have protagonists who are morally questionable. Typically, it's my belief that having basically evil characters (the narrator of "The Eyes of the Mummy" isn't evil, but he is greedy) face, and lose to, the horror of your story or novel is a little bit of a cheat, in that seeing a villain get their comeuppance can rob the horror of its horror. EC Comics did this time and time again, but they had such a bright and vividly salacious way of going about it that it was essentially the house style, and quite entertaining. The problem is that it can turn horror into just another kind of revenge story. But with "The Faceless God," which features a truly awful piece of filth as its main character, Bloch makes it work. The character is Doctor Carnoti, a man with archaeology and anthropology in his background, but who is introduced to the reader in the first paragraph as he is torturing a man for information -- this is medieval, bloody, disabling torture -- and, once Carnoti gets what he wants he orders the man killed by one of his servants. What he wants is information on the location of a massive statue buried in the middle of nowhere, Egypt division, but which was briefly and partially uncovered by accident by a passing caravan. Carnoti is interested because it's supposedly very well preserved, the Egyptian god depicted is unknown (and three-headed), and all of this comes together to cause Carnoti to believe this discovery will make him rich and famous. The problem is, the Egyptians who hire him know that this is a statue of Nyarlathotep, a walking nightmare of a god whose existence has been wiped away from Egyptian mythological texts, and whose specific attributes were disbursed to other legends of other gods. It is best, it had been decided, that no one speak of Nyarlathotep.

"The Faceless God" is basically a Lovecraft story written by Robert Bloch, which for me at least means that it goes down a lot more smoothly. But it's very explicitly Lovecraft. First there's Nyarlathotep, which is a Lovecraft creation, and then there's this passage, one of the most interesting in "The Faceless God," where Bloch turns briefly away from Carnoti to create a scholarly history that combines our world and Lovecraft's:

[Nyarlathotep] is mentioned cryptically in the Necronomicon, for Alhazred heard it whispered in tales of shadowed Irem. The fabulous Book of Eibon hints at the myth in veiled and diverse ways, for it was writ in a far-off time when it was not yet deemed safe to speak of things that had walked upon the earth when it was young. Ludvig Prinn, who traveled in Saracenic lands and learned strange sorceries, awesomely implies his knowledge in the infamous Mysteries of the Worm.

But his worship, in late years, seems to have died out. There is no mention of it in in Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, and most reputable ethnologists and anthropologists are frankly ignorant of the Faceless One's history...

For whatever reason, I really like that mention of The Golden Bough, even if it's only to point out how strange that Frazer never mentions Nyarlathotep. But of course that's the point: The Faceless God is sadistically and diabolically and hatefully powerful, he cannot even exist in legend. And uncovering that statue is a form of blasphemy, and will bring him down on you.

Which is what happens to Carnoti. The reason this story can put a villain like Carnoti front and center without seeming like a cheat is that only someone like Carnoti would go after this statue, his avarice driving him straight through any objections offered up for his own good. And simply freeing a portion of that giant statue from the sand is actually sort of the end of the story, even though there are several more pages to go. But he's doomed, and in the rest of "The Faceless God," Bloch merely chronicles, with no little satisfied cruelty, Carnoti's descent into madness and finally a kind of reverent death. Along the way, Bloch writes in a way, and about things, I'm simply not used to from him; however often he may have done it, it's outside of my experience of his work. But his handle on this sort of thing, giant evil gods who live only to destroy men and make them suffer, is quite firm. It's like Lovecraft, but without the turgidness. "The Faceless One" is swift that Lovecraft only achieved in his very short stories, like "Pickman's Model" and "The Music of Erich Zann." It's really, really effective, this story, and genuinely horrifying. In fact, that's another reason Carnoti's villainy doesn't really cut into the terror: the terror of Nyarlathotep is so immense, that the Earthly evil of Carnoti feels almost like nothing. Carnoti doesn't become humanized by the end of "The Faceless One," and he's not redeemed at all, but he becomes such a helpless insect under the magnifying glass of a sadistic god, that from a certain distance he could be any one of us.

Resume Normal Life

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On Saturday, the vintage copy of Robert Bloch's The Dead Beat I'd ordered online arrived in the mail. Upon receiving it, I began to flip through it, as you do, and I discovered on the inside front cover I found a second story, one separate from the one about murder and madness that I'd been promised. This one was not written by Bloch -- it was written by a previous owner, in pencil.

.

You probably won't be able to read that, so allow me to transcribe it:

From now: exercise

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to touch toes - start 10 go to 25 - morn & aft

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12 days - can go for ride or downstairs movie

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20 days - exercise squeezing buttocks - 10 times - morn & aft

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25 days resume normal life

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30 days resume intercourse if no bleeding

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40 days see doctor

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I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but I probably shouldn't laugh. I do hope things turned out okay.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 16 - The Clams Aren't Safe

William Peter Blatty's Elsewhere sort of just appeared one day. This novella first appeared in Al Sarrantonio's great horror anthology, 999, which came out, appropriately enough, in 1999 (it's scheduled to be published as a stand-alone book this December). 999 is full of terrific, or at least interesting, short fiction, but Elsewhere is the centerpiece of that anthology. For one thing, at 100 pages, it's by far the longest piece in the book, but more importantly it marked Blatty's return to horror fiction; his previous novel in this genre, Legion, the sequel to The Exorcist, was published sixteen years prior.

What a lot of people don't realize these days is that Blatty began his career as a comedic novelist. Which Way to Mecca, Jack? and John Goldfarb, Please Come Home opened the door for him to write for the movies, and began a long partnership with Blake Edwards (in those days, Blatty's most famous credit was as co-writer of the first Inspector Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark). So The Exorcist, his blockbuster novel from 1971, was really an anomaly. That novel grew from Blatty's Catholic faith, among other things, and forever changed the way he was perceived as a writer. Blatty never set out to be a horror writer, and I imagine he still doesn't think of himself that way, but since 1971 his work has been either a part of that genre, or a bizarre and twisted genre entirely its own, like the novel, and film, The Ninth Configuration.

The first time I heard about Elsewhere, it was being talked about as film, which Blatty would write for William Friedkin, the filmmaker behind The Exorcist, to direct. As a huge fan of Blatty's by that point (whenever it was, I can't really remember, but it was a long time ago), I was very excited by the idea that he was returning to horror. I have a vague recollection that, in the piece I read about this up-coming film, Blatty said that while he really didn't know much about horror, his experiences with The Exorcist had taught him how to manipulate the audience into being scared. He'd become familiar with the methods, tricks, that sort of thing. So okay, I said, let's see this movie. But the movie never happened. That magazine, or newspaper, reference I read was the first and last reference to it I ever encountered. Friedkin's career had sunk pretty low at the time, and I have to assume that had something to do with the scuttling of the project, but why any studio would turn their back on the opportunity to slap "From the Writer and the Director of 'The Exorcist'" on a poster is still beyond me.

Anyway, as I said, it never happened. Then, one day, I'm browsing in some bookstore somewhere, and I find this book 999. And among the many big name contributors (King, Oates, Gaiman, Ligotti) was William Peter Blatty, and his story, a 100 page novella, was called Elsewhere. Well, all right then, I said to myself, as I bought the book. And now, nearly ten years later, I've read it.

The set up to Elsewhere is pretty much the same as that of The Haunting of Hill House (or The House on Haunted Hill, for that matter). Joan Freeboard is a realtor (she's ocassionally referred to, bizarrely, as "the Realtor") who has been tasked with selling a secluded mansion on a small island in New York. The house is called Elsewhere, and it has a reputation for being haunted. One of its previous owners, a doctor named Peter Quandt, murdered his wife, then took his own life. Since then, subsequent residents have met with various bizarre fates, some lethal, some not. This has happened often enough that, for many years, the house has been uninhabited. Freeboard, who has been suffering from strange dreams involving an oddly familiar angel whose cryptic messages she doesn't understand, is determined to sell Elsewhere, and hits upon the idea of clearing its name. So she recruits her old friend Terrence Dare, a famous writer; a British psychic named Anna Trawley; and an esteemed expert in the supernatural named Gabriel Case. The four of them will stay in the house for a period of time and investigate -- since Freeboard doesn't believe in ghosts, she believes Trawley and Case will find nothing. Dare will write up their experiences as a magazine article. The renown attached to Dare, not to mention Case and Trawley, should end all the dark rumors and supersitions surrounding Elsewhere, Freeboard reasons, the house will be sold, and she'll make quite a bit of money.

But, of course, once they get to the house, odd things begin happening. Dare thinks he sees a priest scurrying through a door, in the dark. He also seems to have lost his beloved dogs, which he'd insisted on bringing with him. Or did he bring them? Everyone seems to be suffering from weird memory lapses. And Freeboard experiences a wicked case of deja vu. And why doesn't Gabriel Case look like his picture? Well, everything gets answered. And it's all just too damned pat.

As it happens, a few days ago, over at Cinema Styles, a discussion was brewing about the pros and cons of the ambiguity levels of the film version of The Exorcist. Those who felt that there should have been more ambiguity argued that the question of whether or not Regan was actually possessed should have remained unanswered until the end, and that Father Karras's struggle with his faith could have played out the same way, with no loss of emotional or visceral power. Those who argued against that point of view (and I was among them...okay, I was the only one) said that this would have simply been ambiguity for its own sake. If that unanswered question doesn't alter the outcome, then what's the point of leaving it unanswered? In art, ambiguity is a tool, or a shading, and should only be employed when it has a purpose. I can see no purpose for it in The Exorcist, when the the question is finally simply "yes" or "no". Not only that, but the question -- is Regan possessed? -- is only interesting if the answer is yes.

But in Elsewhere, the question isn't simply "yes" or "no". As with The Exorcist, the question of the supernatural in Elsewhere shouldn't be raised, because, for this story to work, the answer must be "yes". Yet the question that shouldn't be answered so cleanly, but which Blatty goes ahead and answers, is "why". I can't think of a haunted house story that has ever benifited from a neat wrap-up. The model for Blatty's novella, as I've already said, is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Now I realize there are many people who argue about the presence of the supernatural in that novel, too, but the point is that even if you're convinced, as I am, that Jackson's ghosts are real, by the end of the novel you still don't know exactly what has happened, and the sense of dread and unease is, as a result, heightened.

The story is also not served well by its short length. I rarely argue that a work of fiction needs to be longer than it is, but this is a case where another fifty pages or more would have been a help. When Blatty reaches his explanation, he rushes through the characters' reactions, so the last few pages essentially read like this:

CHARACTER 1: So there's your answer. That's why we had all those ghosts.

CHARACTER 2: No kidding. That is nuts.

CHARACTER 1: I know, isn't it?

CHARACTER 2: Yes. But I accept your answer. Now I'm going to leave.

CHARACTER 3: Me too.

CHARACTER 1: I understand.

The other thing about Elsewhere, which is dicier to talk about, is that the novella occupies a place in probably the smallest off-shoot of the genre: optimistic horror. Seen from a certain point of view -- the point of view Blatty would like you to take -- even the shocking horror of The Exorcist is optimistic. Blatty is an unapologetic Catholic, and that's right there on the surface of his fiction. This is something that I quite frankly like about his work. His writing in the genre always reinforces the idea of a benevolent God, and of a peaceful afterlife, even while acknowledging the deep pain human beings suffer in this life. Such is the case with Elsewhere, which is fine, but this time Blatty doesn't attack his subject with the unblinking sharpness of The Exorcist. There's a meat-and-potatoes quality to his take on Catholicism in that book (and film) that I love. This time around he's more moony-eyed about the whole thing, more self-consciously mystical, and it makes the novella come off as soppy.

This isn't helped by his constant injection of humor, of the rapid-fire dialogue, one-liner variety. Some of this is funny, much of it is not, and there's generally just too damn much of it. There's always been humor in his serious fiction, even in The Exorcist, but the humor never overwhelmed the narrative. Here it does. Elsewhere would almost play as a supernatural comedy, if the humor was funnier.

Before reading Elsewhere, I hadn't read Blatty in many, many years. When I come back to a writer I've enjoyed in the past, after several years away, and find myself struggling to enjoy his or her work, I have to wonder if I've grown out of it, if my tastes have evolved to the point where this author has been left behind. I've wondered this about several horror writers, like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch. But with Bloch and Matheson, the work I don't enjoy is almost always their late fiction, written well after their heyday. When I return to their older work, as I just did with Bloch, I find that I wasn't wrong to like them before...they were good. It's just that they eventually became tapped out. This may be the case with Blatty. It would be weird to say that I hope this is the case, because I would love it if Blatty got his old rhythm back. But he's never been prolific, and that may not happen, and Elsewhere may be his swan song. If so, that's a shame. Still, being able to say that you're the guy behind The Exorcist, Legion and The Ninth Configuration -- in both their novel and film incarnations -- ain't too shabby.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 15 - Laughing Like Crazy

Robert Bloch once titled one of his short story collections Such Stuff as Screams are Made Of. Although the cover doesn't really make this clear, I'm going to go ahead and assume that Bloch's preference was that the words "screams" be printed in all caps.

That's the kind of horror writer Bloch was. In his introduction to the aforementioned book, Gahan Wilson says:

Chatting on about rotting vampires or slavering fiends did not seem to depress him in any way. Indeed, it often appeared that nothing cheered him up more than some new way to sever heads of inflict damage on innocent children, and any ghastly act of sadism which crossed his mind only set him to chortling, so long as he could make a pun on it.

If all of that is true, then obviously Bloch's imaginative capacity for sadism was extremely limited compared to the horror writers who succeeded him. And that's one of the things that's so great about him: to our jaded eyes, his stuff is downright charming. Yes, he had a tendency to throw out the occasional awful pun, but he also could tell a great, straight-forward story, a story that was genuinely creepy, fun, often with a great stinger of a last line. Bloch -- along with Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and others -- helped bridge the gap between the horror of H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James and the endlessly influential The Twilight Zone, as well as comic books like Tales from the Crypt. In short, before hitting it big when his novel Psycho was adapted as a film, Robert Bloch was a pulp writer. So was everyone else I've mentioned here, save James, but Bloch was one of those guys who made his living pounding out one short story after another for roughly a penny a word, who wrote fiction as a 9 to 5 job. And the results were successful, more often than not.

In "The Weird Tailor", a man named Erik Conrad, who works in the title profession, sees that his business is failing around him. It's hard to say for sure why, but the incredibly unsettling dummy he has set up in his front window. The dummy -- whom his abused immigrant wife takes to calling Otto, after her beloved and deceased cousin -- is falling apart, and its grinning face has taken on a kind of demented, leering quality. Oh well, can't be helped. Conrad is too busy worrying about his debts, anyway. Fortunately, one day a man named Mr. Smith enters the shop and asks that he make a very special suit for his son. The suit must be made out of a very strange fabric which Smith provides himself, and it must be made to the exact (and bizarre) specifications laid out. Oh, and Conrad can only work on the suit at certain times of the night. This, Smith says, is because he believes in astrology...

In "Lucy Comes to Stay", a woman named Vi is being kept locked up in her own home by her husband George and a live-in nurse. Vi's friend Lucy, who has to sneak in to visit her, tells her that George and the nurse are having an affair, and are tricking the doctors into believing Vi is insane. Although Lucy frequently insults Vi, she does promise to help her escape. Which she does. But how did they get out?

I know, what I've written is nothing more than a couple of blurbs for a couple of obscure Bloch short stories. But frankly, there's not much to say about these. Both are good, solid stories. They may not stop you cold with their brilliance, and the methods he uses might now seem shop-worn to some of you, but that's because Bloch has been ripped off a lot. And as I said, they're just fun. Fun's good.