appeared in book form as It’s All in Your Mind.The
novel features a young man who acquires a num-
ber of psychic powers while out drinking, further
complicated by the arrival of various amusingly
portrayed villains including vampires and commu-
nists. Bloch would continue to write short fantasy
fiction sporadically, but it was never a significant
part of his work, which became primarily supernat-
ural and/or psychological suspense. The best of his
nonhorror work is “That Hell-Bound Train”
(1958), which won the Hugo Award as best story
of the year from the World Science Fiction Con-
vention, one of the first fantasies ever to win that
honor. The story is a deal-with-the-devil variation
and one of the very best examples of its type.
Bloch’s first collection of horror stories, The
Opener of the Way,appeared in 1945. Although
some of the stories are crude by his later standards,
there is a raw power to many of them that has en-
sured their continued popularity. Among the best
in the collection are the title story, “THE OPENER OF
THE WAY”, which concerns an Egyptian tomb,
“YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER” (1943), wherein
an immortal Jack the Ripper claims new victims in
Chicago, and “The Dark Demon” (1936), whose
protagonist is a transparent image of fellow writer
Lovecraft. A follow-up collection did not appear
until 1960, when the same publisher issued Pleasant
Dreams,whose contents were generally of much
better quality. The outstanding stories this time in-
cluded the classics “THE CHEATERS” (1947), “The
Hungry House” (1951), the animated piano of “Mr.
Steinway” (1954), and “That Hell-Bound Train”.
Bloch’s popularity jumped dramatically follow-
ing Psycho,and no less than twelve new collections
appeared during the 1960s containing some new
material and a large but not exhaustive selection of
his earlier work. Most of the stories from the first
two collections were reprinted, as well as many ex-
cellent but overlooked stories such as “THE SKULL
OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE” (1945) and “The
Ghost Writer” (1940). The collection Blood Runs
Cold(1961) contained primarily nonfantastic sto-
ries, but others such as Nightmares(1961), More
Nightmares(1961), and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
(1962) reshuffled the older stories from Bloch’s
earlier collections, which had been available only
in hardcover editions. Bogey Men(1963), despite
the title, is predominantly fantasy and very light
horror. The remaining collections from this period
are uneven, mixing more recent work with older
stories, some of them better left in obscurity. Bloch
wrote several novels during this period and would
continue to do so throughout the rest of his career,
but almost all of these were nonfantastic thrillers,
including two sequels to Psycho,neither of which
had any connection to the movie sequels.
Bloch’s short fiction appeared less frequently
from the 1970s onward. A three-volume set of his
short fiction contains most of his better stories,
consisting of Bitter Ends, Final Reckonings,and Last
Rites,all published in 1988. Additional collections
of merit include The Best of Robert Bloch(1977)
and Cold Chills(1977). Two new collections of his
oldest work also appeared. The Early Fears(1993)
is a general selection, while Mysteries of the Worm
(1981) gathers together his Lovecraftian pastiches.
“THE SCENT OF VINEGAR” (1994) won the Bram
Stoker Award.
Bloch did write a few book-length supernatu-
ral works. The first of these was Strange Eons
(1979). H. P. Lovecraft and other writers who con-
tributed to his Cthulhu Mythos, which became an
early shared universe, always described efforts to
recall the alien beings that once ruled the Earth
but never considered the possible consequences of
their return to power. Bloch addressed that issue
headlong in this suspenseful story, in which a group
of people discover that Lovecraft’s fiction was
based on fact and that the conquest of humanity is
at hand. Lori(1990) was somewhat more ambigu-
ous. The title character loses her parents to a bru-
tal murderer on the day of her high school
graduation, after which a psychic warns her that
two men will enter her life and that one of them
will kill her if she does not take desperate mea-
sures. The supernatural element is minimal but
crucial to the plot. The Jekyll Legacy(1990), writ-
ten with Andre NORTON, suggests that Edward
Hyde may have survived despite the death of Dr.
Jekyll.
Many of Bloch’s short stories were adapted for
television, and he also wrote movie screenplays and
adaptations including The Couch(1962), from his
own novel, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1962), The
Deadly Bees(1967), and The House That DrippedBloch, Robert 27